From thielr@Mailer.Uni-Marburg.DE Sun Apr 18 08:00:58 1999 Received: from mxu2.u.washington.edu (mxu2.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.9]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.02/8.9.3+UW99.01) with ESMTP id IAA123876 for ; Sun, 18 Apr 1999 08:00:57 -0700 Received: from Mailer.Uni-Marburg.DE (Mailer.Uni-Marburg.DE [137.248.1.76]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.02/8.9.3+UW99.01) with ESMTP id IAA25907 for ; Sun, 18 Apr 1999 08:00:56 -0700 Received: from [193.174.76.158] (mppp030.ppp.Uni-Marburg.DE [193.174.76.158]) by Mailer.Uni-Marburg.DE (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with ESMTP id RAA15342 for ; Sun, 18 Apr 1999 17:00:52 +0200 Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <199904180618.PAA16632@ham.t.u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp> References: <199904171927.VAA19099@dns.terminal.cz> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 09:33:24 +0200 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: Rainer Thiel Subject: Re: Pronunciation of upsilon At 8:16 Uhr +0200 on 18.04.1999, Steven J. Willett wrote: > At a fairly early date, perhaps in the 4th century BCE, it > mutated in both Attic and Ionic toward an i-sound that Latin found > very difficult to represent. In addition to what Steven J. Willet has rightly stated, I may say that 1. Quintilian states that y (in his time?, or following an earlier source?) is a sound between i and u. 2. if memory serves me, /k/ before u is (usually?) written kappa (as before i, e, a) in the old Attic alphabet, but qoppa (as before o) in other local alphabets. This is possibly a hint that the shift |u| -> |y| may be even earlier than the 4th c. BC in Attic. 3. in Aeolic (e.g., Sappho) upsilon sometimes stands for what is |o| in other dialects: A)PU/ = A)PO/, thus suggesting upsilon to be taken as (a relatively open) u (or a very closed o). Hochschuldozent Dr. phil. Rainer Thiel - Paper mail: Univ. FB 07, Klass. Phil. - D-35032 Marburg, Germany (EU) - For more information and for my PGP public key check my homepage: http://staff-www.uni-marburg.de/~thielr/ .