From lwright@cac.washington.edu Tue May 1 06:48:28 2001 Received: from mxu4.u.washington.edu (mxu4.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.03) with ESMTP id f41DmP907786 for ; Tue, 1 May 2001 06:48:25 -0700 Received: from mxout2.cac.washington.edu (mxout2.cac.washington.edu [140.142.33.4]) by mxu4.u.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.04) with ESMTP id f41DmPF30409 for ; Tue, 1 May 2001 06:48:25 -0700 Received: from shiva1.cac.washington.edu (shiva1.cac.washington.edu [140.142.100.201]) by mxout2.cac.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.04) with ESMTP id f41DmLo25629; Tue, 1 May 2001 06:48:21 -0700 Received: from localhost (lwright@localhost) by shiva1.cac.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.04) with ESMTP id f41DmKL24569; Tue, 1 May 2001 06:48:20 -0700 Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 06:48:20 -0700 (PDT) From: Linda Wright To: cc: Subject: Digamma (fwd) Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=X-UNKNOWN Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 13:24:10 +0200 From: "Astrid[ISO-8859-1] Nor=8En" Subject: Digamma I'm a student from Sweden following your discussions with great interest. What has been occupying my mind for the last weeks is the use of digamma, and I figured the best way to get some answers maybe would be addressing my questions to you. So what do you think of the following? 1. The use of digamma as a cipher. Some say this was the primal use of the digamma, others that there was a special sign called stigma replacing the digamma for the figure 6. The stigma would look like the sigma does as the last letter of a word. In that case, why do these forms correspond? 2. I also saw your comments on Tsakonian, where it was said to be the closest remains of the old Macedonian language. But other sources claim a Dorian origin for Tsakonian, and wasn't the Macedonian language kind of a North-West Greek dialect? (Maybe this is not a terribly important difference since they're both West-Greek dialects, although North-West Greek dialects seem to have retained the digamma for a longer time). 3. Last of all I'm wondering if there are any theories why the upsilon was placed last in the alphabet. Did the Greek feel they were inventing a new letter, since the upsilon was a vowel coming from the Phoenician consonant vau? Although this doesn't seem to have stopped them from keeping the Phoenician order in other cases, when they changed consonants into vowels. I suppose it could be different when they also hade kept the Phoenician consonant as a Greek consonant, the digamma. But on the other hand, isn't it wrong to describe the digamma as a consonant, as it in Lesbian was used as a vowel? Or maybe the digamma originally really was a consonant in all places? /Astrid Nor=E9n .