[B-Greek] BH BH, the bleating of an ancient sheep
Kevin Riley
klriley at alphalink.com.au
Thu Jul 16 22:51:07 EDT 2009
I think we all realise that the phonology of Classical Greek, or of any
period, is not determined solely from the noises animals made. We cannot
rule out that the ancient Greeks heard sheep going 'vee vee', or even that
there was an ancient breed of sheep that did indeed say 'vee vee'. The
evidence from animal noises is only one piece of evidence, and I suspect few
(if any) experts actually place more weight on this than other evidence. It
is just one minor example that happens to be easier to explain to
non-specialists than the evidence from cognate languages and borrowings to
and from Greek. I don't believe there is any argument among Greek scholars
about the change from long A to H to long I to the modern I, just about when
this happened.
Kevin Riley
-------Original Message-------
From: David McKay
Date: 17/07/2009 12:27:29 PM
Trickier than you might think, Mitch.
If you study the sounds that people say various animals make, there is a lot
Of variety. For instance, only English people say that a rooster says
Cock-a-doodle-doo.
It is not at all certain that ancient Greeks thought the sheep was saying
Baa Baa. Maybe they did hear it as Vee vee. I don't think that would settle
The pronunciation of BH at all.
David McKay
2009/7/17 Mitch Larramore <mitchlarramore at yahoo.com>
>
> To demonstrate that ancient Greek writers did NOT pronounce Greek as the
> Moderns do (at least in some cases), a text was sighted which described
the
> sound sheep make. The ancient (comedy) writer identified, so it was argued
> the sound of a sheep as BH BH (bah, bah). Modern Greeks of course would
> pronounce BH BH 'vee vee.' Does anybody know the whereabouts of that
> particular ancient text, if it exists at all? Seems to me the guy who
> originally put forth this argument did not actually quote the ancient text
> which made me a bit leery. However, if this text actually exists, I
suppose
> that would settle the pronunciation question to some extent.
>
>
> Mitch Larramore
> Sugar Land, Texas
>
>
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