[B-Greek] Correct reading of Philo text.......

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Oct 14 15:34:03 EDT 2003


At 8:32 PM +0100 10/14/03, Ranulf Doswell wrote:
>>[...] so I'm looking to see what others think of this.  Is
>>hEWS OU or hEWS hOU the correct reading?
>
>I'm only a beginner, and have no idea about this text, however I've been
>reading a fair bit on morphology recently.
>
>It strikes me that hEWS hOU is actually quite hard to say distinctly from
>hEWS OU. Or to be clearer, if you say hEWS hOU quickly the second aspirate
>tends to be lost in the S sound. So, whilst the aspirated version may well
>be correct, it's quite possible that writing it phonetically would miss off
>the aspirate. It seems the Greeks had a tendency to change words
>phonetically to make pronounciation easier and modify spelling to suit,
>contrasted to other languages which are spelt regularly but pronounced
>irregularly.

Nevertheless there's a difference of meaning; with hEWS it must be hOU, and
not OU. As David says, the OU makes no sense whereas in Hellenistic Greek
hEWS hOU (or MECRIS hOU or ACRIS hOU) is the standard expression for "until
such time as ... (x has happened)"
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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