From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Wed Dec 31 1997 - 11:15:22 EST
At 11:22 PM -0600 12/30/97, Carlton Winbery wrote:
>Carl Conrad responded to Stephen;
>
>>Stephen Carlson has kindly called my attention (off-list!) to my gaffe in
>>citation of the opening line of the Iliad: the genitive form of the last
>>word is and must be ACILHOS with a single lambda
>
>This spelling of the genitive (ACILHOS) convinced James Brooks and I that
>what happened with this class of nouns is that there was a reversal of
>values (H became E and O became W) and that the resulting form was treated
>as one vowel sound for accent purposes, thus PO/LEWS sg. and PO/LEWN pl.
Well, "reversal of values" is exactly what "vowel metathesis" means, I
believe. It's an interesting question. I think we are dealing with a
phonological development unique to Attic-Ionic dialect whereby a diphthong
ending in a long-vowel sound emerges out of the fusion of adjacent long and
short vowels. Another of these diphthongs that I've always found
fascinating is what happens to -AU- in compounding, especially of reflexive
pronouns: when that little 3rd-person pronominal element 'hE' is linked
with forms of AUTOS, we get a form spelled hEAUTOU, hEAUTWi, ktl., but my
suspicion is that what actually happens in these forms is that we have a
diphthong in which the E is short and the A long followed by a digamma
represented by the U, giving something I'll try to transliterate awkwardly
as "heh-aaaah-w-tow." At any rate, in the Ionic of Herodotus this becomes
hEWUTOU--as if the U/digamma is turning the A into an O-vowel; I've
sometimes wondered whether this is akin to the way a Vav in Hebrew can,
under varying circumstances represent either a U-vowel or an O-vowel.
Another Ionic instance of the same phenomenon is Herodotus' QWUMA for Attic
QAUMA ("marvel," "miracle," "strange thing").
This raises still another phonological issue in my mind: I've often thought
that the Greek OU (the diphthong, whether spurious--from contraction--or
genuine) probably should be pronounced like and English long O with an
appended weak consonantal W, what we actually spell out in some words like
BOW or TOW, and what some of our words still spelled -OUGH have come to be
in pronunciation, long after they have ceased to end in any sort of
guttural aspirate. Any thoughts on this?
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cconrad@yancey.main.nc.us
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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