[B-Greek] Vowel shift

Vasile STANCU stancu at mail.dnttm.ro
Thu Apr 16 16:27:00 EDT 2009


I noticed an interesting example of the vowel shift process, as it happens
today: a name was cited in one of the recent messages, as "Ivor". I suppose
that the actual name of the person that stands behind this citation is
"Iver". This may give us some clue regarding one of the possible mechanisms
by which Ancient Greek underwent similar processes.

 

Here is an hypothetical scenario:

 

-          Suppose the person cited, i.e. Iver, has made an extraordinary
statement that has a great impact on the people in Scotland, which is why he
was cited by Margaret;

-          Suppose Margaret is such a welknown person in Scotland that
everybody is kean to find out daily what she has to say in the field where
she is very famous;

-          All of a sudden, many people begin scattering around the name of
"Ivor", as being responsible for such and such;

-          In a generation's time - or parhaps even earlier, in our time -,
scholars find it interesting that vowel "e" has shifted to "o" - at least in
such constructions like "Iver/Ivor".

 

My supposition is that such proccesses do not take place - at least when
they are reasonably extensive - unless there are important
influences/pressure from outside the system. I mean, people in Denmark would
very hesitatingly, if ever, forge "Iver" into "Ivor". However, if cultural
trends that involve people in Scotland are seriously implemented in Denmark
as well, I would not be amazed finding out that such changes did occur in
Danish. As far as my own language is concerned, by end of the 19th century
the Latin alphabet was adopted, but there was strong opposition to that due
to the fact that all of the sounds of Romanian were not covered by the Latin
characters; previous to that, the Cyrilic alphabet had been in use, at least
since mid-17th century. As for Latin characters, appropriate combinations
were later proposed and are now used so as to cover all sounds. But Romanian
has never been an "international" language and I believe this is why no
major changes occured in time: I can read the Romanian Bible of 1688 nearly
as easily as I do the most recent translations.

 

Greek has suffered drastic changes, most of which, I believe, have been
generated from without, rather than from within the Greek system. It is not
by mere coincidence, probably, that most of these changes are contemporary
with the internationalization of the language after Alexander.

 

Vasile STANCU 




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