[B-Greek] Re: writing upsilon phonetically
Chet Creider
creider at uwo.ca
Sun Apr 10 20:27:40 EDT 2005
Randall Buth writes:
> I see a problem with some recent emails I sent. When writing a
> phonetic symbol for German "ue" or French "u" I can type with a
> Windows keyboard "Control-shift-colon" followed by "U" or "u". This
> appears correctly on the screen, but as "|" and "\" in the b-greek
> files I received. (Actually, I have no guarantee that the vertical and
> backslash symbols that I just typed will show up in this either.)
>
> So how does one type a "u with umlaut" for b-greek?
XAIRE RANDALL--
You should not be able to do this. First of all, all postings to B-Greek should
be in "lower ASCII", and umlaut characters are generally in higher ASCII. This
is a good practice since so many different platforms and different encodings are
used by different users. Second, the B-Greek orthography is a transcription
system for Greek characters, not a phonetic orthography.
If you want to indicate how a particular letter was pronounced at a particular
time you should put an ASCII symbol in square brackets after the B-Greek letter.
For example, the IPA symbol for a close (high) front rounded vowel is [y] and
if you wanted to show that this was the pronunciation of Y at the time of Christ,
you could write Y [y]. To show the modern pronunciation write Y [i]; to show the Homeric
pronunciation write Y [u]. There are various ASCII versions of the IPA around.
If you need one, do a Google search for UCL + IPA +ASCII (UCL is University College
London, the home of the IPA, the International Phonetic Association).
[I know you know all this, Randall, but I think it is useful to remember that the
B-Greek orthography is a transcription system for Greek orthography and has no
inherent phonetic basis (and shouldn't, either)].
ERRWSO,
Chet
Chet Creider
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