[B-Greek] BBG: Elementary Parsing Question Contract Verbs
James Tauber
jtauber at jtauber.com
Wed Sep 13 11:29:32 EDT 2006
On Wed, 13 Sep 2006 14:34:56 +0000, "Stephen Baldwin"
<stbaldwi at hotmail.com> said:
> In response to Mr. Tabuer's question
> " If the ending, after intervocalic sigma drop were actually EIAI, would
> that invalidate the POIHi spelling?" I would have to answer "Don't know".
> I
> don't know whether EIAI even contracts and if so, what it contracts to.
Well, bear in mind that EI here is really just a long E, not a
diphthong. So it is reasonable that long-E + A > H just as short-E + A >
H.
> But if we were to drop the sigma first and then contract first the
> connecting vowel and the first ending vowel, that to me makes more sense:
> hence:
> POIE + E + SAI > POIE + EAI > POIEHi > POIHi
Historically, this is probably what happened (unless one simply accepts
the analogical explanation). The loss of sigma (via a change to h) is
one of the changes that took place from Proto-Indo-European to
Proto-Greek. The EE > EI is a much later spelling change (prior to 403BC
it probably would have just been written E)
> But what do I know? I'm only a software engineer who'd rather study
> greek!
> But the question arises because of the perceived inconsistency in BBG and
> my
> impression that when we have contractions, vocalic droppings, and all
> the
> rest occurring simultaneously, the order in which these morphing
> operations
> are executed makes a difference -- hence the question regarding rules of
> precedence...
You are quite right that the order can make a difference. (I know this
well, as I have implemented rules like this in software for the last 12
years and no grammar is ever explicit enough about what the rules
actually are and how they are applied)
These "rules" aren't applied simultaneously. In fact, they were applied
over a period of hundreds of years. Mounce unfortunately conflates
historical (and pre-historical) sound change with synchronic
phonological rules with orthographic rules.
James Tauber
--
James Tauber http://jtauber.com/
journeyman of some http://jtauber.com/blog/
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