Go back to the tablets. Screaming nonsense doesn't make it true.
This is how real Greeks speak and write. They can't hear these gradations
of length and breathing with which you delude yourself. That's why they
have stopped writing the breathings.
different sound for everything written in katharevousa.
vowel and second as a consonant.
change was Romance, not Germanic.
Now go away.
Post by AgamemnonPost by George DurbridgeAggie,
Start taking the tablets again. You display an ignorance of Greek
almost as complete as your ignorance of English. I have snipped
portions of your post which were too silly for words.
Post by AgamemnonGreek
has always been pronounced the same way for over 3000 years since the
time of Homer.
This is wrong, to your knowledge. Greek pronunciation has varied over
space and time, and stll varies. For example, the loss of the letter
NO IT HAS NOT !
Post by George Durbridgedigamma and of the words and inflections which depended on it reflected
below,
WRONG. That did NOT change the pronunciation of Greek whatsoever. It is
as idiotic as saying that the introduction of the word sokolata
(chocolate) into the Greek language has changed its pronunciation which
clearly it hasn't. Words which used the digamma were NO LONGER written
with a digamma when the digamma went out of use so unlike in English
which has silent letters, Greek does not have anything of the king thus
the pronunciation DID NOT CHANGE, the SPELLING changed instead.
Post by George Durbridgeyou mention that C5th BC Doric differed from Ionic and so on. From
what you say below, you seem to mean something different i.e. that the
sound associated with each letter of the Greek alphabet has been the
same,
Doria and Ionic were different dialects and the words were spelled
differently to show the way they were pronounced. Get it inot you head
that the proncoied of the Greek alphabe has ALLWAYS remeined the same
since the time of Homer. It is NOT like the English alphabet were
everyone pronounces the vowels and consonants differently In the Greek
alphabet ALL of the letters have names and since those names are Semitic
in origin everyone had to learn the correct Semitic pronunciation of the
names of the letters that was used by the Cadmians who introduced the
alphabet into Greece. Since they all learned the pronounciation from a
single source and the names of the letters were foreign the Greeks could
not do as the English did and change the sounds of the letters to fit
into existing dialectal pronunciation but had to learn the correct
proscription from the start. After that the SPELLED EACH WORD AS IT
SOUNDED !
Post by George Durbridgewherever and whenever Greek was written, so that dialect was faithfully
reflected in local spellings.
On the evidence of modern Greek, that isn't true either. Modern Greek is
WRONG. It is perfectly true.
Post by George Durbridgenearly as bad as English at associating one sound with one letter, and for
WRONG.
Post by George Durbridgemuch the same reason: inherited spellings, which no longer coincide
with the spoken language. You have, for instance, five ways of writing
the sound for which iota stands: iota, ypsilon, epsilon-iota,
omicron-iota, eta. On the other hand, ypsilon can be pronounced in at
least three completely different ways: like iota, standing alone, like
beta, following alpha or epsilon, or like English oo in book, following
omicron.
All the "i" sounds in Greek are pronounced differently and have
different breathings, but an ignorant Anglo-Saxon that thinks ancient
Greek was pronounced like home counties English couldn't possibly notice
that.
The diphthongs in Greek are ALWAYS pronounced the same way and JNOT
randomly like in English. "AU" is always av as in averse and "OU" is
always "oo" and I will NOT use the example book because everyone know
perfectly well that some people pronounce the oo in book as a short
sound and others pronounce it as a very long sound as in food, which
once again proves my point about the completely random way in which
English is pronounced. In fact it is impossible to describe the Greek
"ou" sound in English because of this. All that I can say is that it is
a short oo sound.
Post by George DurbridgeThese letters are respectively redundant and over-defined, from the
point of view of expressing the sounds of modern Greek. The commonest
spelling
WRONG. The letters are all pronounced differently and save having to use
accents like in French.
Post by George Durbridgemistakes in modern Greek consist of substituting one redundant letter
for another. They begin to make sense, when you observe that, for
instance, in antiquity, Greeks and Romans alike treated ypsilon as
equivalent to Latin u (except in inflections).
WRONG.
NOBODY in Greece makes the mistake of substituting u for i. The only
common mistake is the substitution of iota for ita and that is because
they usually forget the breath at the end of words ending in ita. Those
kind of spelling mistakes stem from the use of English which has an
inadequate number of i sounds.
Post by George DurbridgeThe redundant forms are kept because they express meaning which is
current, even if the sounds are lost. For instance, although nowadays
omicron and omega sound the same, and are often written in place of one
another, the articles and the genitive plural in omega-nu are generally
spelled correctly.
WRONG AGAIN.
Omicron is a short O sound while Omega is a long O sound, hence the
micro and the mega. These letters habe NOT lost their pronciation. The
mistakes in spelling stems form the fact that some students are to lazy
to check out the lengths of these sounds in the words before writing
them.
Post by George DurbridgePost by AgamemnonFor Greeks who invented the alphabet
every letter was always pronounced the same way by every speaker.
Anywhere that you go in Greece you will always find Alpha pronounced
the same way, Beta pronounced the same way, Gamma pronounced the same
way,
Gamma is pronounced three different ways, to this day, often in the
same word.
WRONG.
Gamma is only pronounced ONE way. The only time the sound changes is
when it is in combination with itself as gg where the sound changes to
ng and this is a standard rule and NOT random.
Post by George DurbridgePost by AgamemnonDelta pronounced the same way and so on. The reason for this is that
when the Greek Cadman alphabet was introduced into Greece it was
introduced everywhere at the same time and everyone spelled the Greek
words as they sounded and the result was that you could easily tell
Attic, Ionic, Aeolic and Doric apart from the way that the words were
spelled.
The simultaneous introduction of the alphabet is plainly wrong. Cyprus
used a script derived from Linear A into Hellenistic times, as you have
And that is way Cypriot pronounciation is are variance with the rest of
Greece, which proves my point.
Post by George Durbridgementioned in this group. There is no reason to believe that the
different sounds of the different dialects were precisely or completely
captured by the local differences in spelling. The usual experience is
that one dialect has sounds for which the other dialect has no standard
letter.
WRONG. Linear B proves that this is NOT POSSIBLE since in Mycenaean
Greek L's and R's were not distinguished nor were P's and B's or T's and
TH's (ie. A-TA-NA is also Athana = Athena, and E-RA is also Ela but ) or
K's and G's.
Post by George DurbridgePost by AgamemnonEven before this in the Germanic languages as a whole in some places D
was pronounced T and in others it was pronounced TH
Very similar things happen in Greek. Delta has changed from equivalent
to Latin d in Ancient Greek, to the equivalent of one of the th sounds
in
NO IT HAS NOT !
Delta has ALWAYS been pronounced with a "the" sound because it is
represented by its own individual symbols in Linear B. If it had a D
sound as in English it would have been part of the T/TH/D group instead
!
It is the Latin "D" sound which has changed in GERMANIC languages such
as English that what is causing you to make this mistake. When the
Franks invaded Italy the Latin D suffered from a degree of consonantal
shift, but as can be heard when talking to a native Italian the Italian
D sound is closer to the Greek delta sound in their accent than to the
English D, which proves that the Greek delta sound has remained
constant.
Post by George DurbridgeEnglish today. You can get a d sound in modern Greek, however, by
writing nu-tau, and otherwise lost accusative final nu can often be
heard this way, because the d can be heard even when the nu is the last
letter of one word and the tau the first letter of the next.
Nonsense. The Greek delta was always a soft "the" and the Greek tau was
the hard d sound, which is made softer by the inclusion of the n before
it to give nt.
Don't give me lectures on consonantal shit in Greek when you are using
as you base line a Germanic language which is riddled with consonantal
shift. Consonantal shift as a mark of Germans languages and NEVER took
place in Greek after the introduction on Cadmian script since Cadmian
script solved the problem which was inherent in Linear B by introducing
new letters from a foreign Semitic language that did not suffer from
consonantal shift to distinguish each sound individually. From this we
know that the Greek kappa sound was NOT like the English k but like the
g as in modern Greek since it was part of the K/G group in Linear B. We
also know that There was ALWAYS a Theta sounds whcih as part of the
T/TH/D group and there was ALLWYS a Delta sound that was part of the "d"
group, and that there was ALWAYS a phi sound since it had a letter of
its own. And futher still we know that the Greek beta was ALWAYS
pronounced V since the word Baslileus is spelled QA-SI-RE-U in Linear B
and there is NO WAY that QA could have possibly become a hard B sound as
in English when it was converted in Cadmain script therefore Beta must
have ALWAYS been Vita since the loss of Quoppa or Qa in this case was
replaced by Va or Vita !
So take your Anglo-Saxon linguistic theory and SHOVE IT. Greek has
always been pronounced the same way since the time of Homer and the
above example prove it. Linguistic theory base on Germanic languages
which ALL suffer from consonantal and vowel shifts is not worth the
paper its written on. Its time that you learned to pronounced Greek
properly and use that is the basis for all linguistic theory instead.