>At 03:52 1/22/97 -0600, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>>At 9:27 PM -0600 1/21/97, Lee R. Martin wrote:
>>>Pardon my intrusion, but it seems to me that the iota in Jerusalem,
>>>Jordan, Jesus, John, et. al. is a pronounced as a consonant, not a
vowel
>>>(corresponding to the Hebrew consonant yod). The only way it could
be
>>>pronounced as a vowel is to add a syllable, e.g. ee-er-u-sa-lem,
>>>ee-or-dan, ee-ey-sus etc.
>>
>>I think that this MAY be true, but how do we KNOW it for sure? What I
said
>>yesterday was that editors, by putting a smooth breathing before the
>>upper-case Iota, seem to be indicating pronunciation as a vowel. That
the
>>Romans used an I for both vowel and consonant we do know, but what
evidence
>>have we for Greek pronunciation of initial I as a consonant at any
time?
>
>I think that whatever evidence we have, it is actually *against*
initial
>I being a consonant/semivowel. First, this semivowel (IPA [j];
English
>"y") is not phonemic in Greek. Second, the initial y- sound from the
>parent language changed to either a h- or Z-. Third, some existing
Greek
>words, though not of Semitic origin, carry the accent on the initial
iota,
>indicating a vowel: e.g. I)/AKXOS, another name for Dionysus.
Therefore,
>I would reluctantly conclude that the initial iota is probably a
vowel.
An additional argument in favor of the position taken here by Stephen,
although only by analogy, is the fact that the Latin consonantal U
(pronounced like our "w," commonly spelled with a "V") was
transliterated into Greek in the same period as OU: e.g. VERGILIUS -->
OUERGILIOS, VARUS --> OUAROS. This would seem to indicate that the only
way Hellenistic Greek could represent these consonantal sounds outside
their repertory of consonants was <underline>as vowels</underline>.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/