[B-Greek] sigma

John McChesney-Young panis at pacbell.net
Thu Jun 10 22:48:24 EDT 2004


On Thu, 10 Jun 2004 16:20:44 +0200 "Jerzy Ostapczuk" <jostap at chat.edu.pl>
had asked:

>>  What is the accent of sigma letter. Cricumfrexus or acutus?
>>  Liddell - Scott - gives sigma with circumflexus.
>>  Polish grammars give sigma with acutus.
>>  What is better solution for the question? To say sigma with
>>  circumflexus or acutus, and why?

And at 8:41 PM -0400 6/10/04, George F. Somsel wrote:

>Letters don't have accents.  Words have accents.  Even so, the accent is
>placed over the vowel rather than the consonant.  Sigma is a consonant.

Is it possible Mr. Ostapczuk refers to the question of the correct 
accent of the letter *name* SI=GMA vs. SI/GMA? In the entry at the 
beginning of the relevant section of the alphabet, LSJ notes, "(both 
accents are found in codd.)" If I understand Ku+hner-Blass correctly, 
it says that the circumflex has more support (" u n k l a r   i s t  
 d i e   S a c h e   be i  SI/GMA ,   d o c h   h a t  SI=GMA  
 m e h r   G e w a+ h r " - feel free to correct or polish my 
translation, anyone :-)). [[1]]

Note though that Smyth section 3 (original edition linked at the 
Perseus page below, and likewise in the printed 1956 Messing 
revision) assigns the letter name an acute accent, as does W. Sidney 
Allen's _Vox Graeca_ in Appendix C, "The Names of the Letters of the 
Greek Alphabet"; neither comments on the variation.

It would be interesting to see what Frisk has to say, but the U of 
Leiden Indo-European database site seems to be down yet again:

http://iiasnt.leidenuniv.nl/

and I don't have handy access to the paper edition.

John

[[1]] Section 1, note 11:

http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0019

-- 


*** John McChesney-Young  **  panis at pacbell.net  **   Berkeley, 
California, U.S.A.  ***



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