by Elucubrator » Wed May 14, 2003 2:30 am
[face=SPIonic][size=18=12]Hi William, <br /><br />I want to know because I want to know how the ancient Greek language sounded as much as possible, as much as we can determine, in the different periods and dialects. W. Sidney Allen has done an excellent job in his book Vox Graeca and he includes a chart that indicates the changes in pronunciation of the vowels through time, but the matter of the spurious and genuine diphthongs is something I can't find much information on. I have read this part in Sihler and in Allen's Vox Graeca but from neither am I able to determine where the changes take place. I think I did read that eventually the pronunciation of the spurious diphthong and the digraph for long epsilon fell together, but the orthography for both had always been the same: EI.<br /><br />I think it was rather the fact that the orthography looked the same that eventually caused pronunciation of the two to approximate one another and eventually end in the same sound, rather than that the sounds having come to be the same, were subsequently written in the same manner. But, the books I mentioned above I have not read in two years, and perhaps I need to give them another glance.<br /><br />Why would it be as difficult as you say? For example, we know that in pei/qw the diphthong is real because we can work it through the sound mill and we know the iota is really there. In the future tense pei/somai from the verb pei/qw is pronounced "pey-so-mai", as the dipthong is real. However, the future of the verb pa/sxw looks identical to the future of the verb pei/qw, namely pei/somai but it has in fact a different pronunciation, namely, "peeh-so-mai".<br /><br />How do we know this? First of all, it is important to remember that the term spurious dipthong only tells us that it's not really a diphthong, but doesn't tell us about what the sound behind the orthography is. What we are really talking about is the lengthening of an epsilon or an omicron. This lengthening of the short vowels may result from one of two reasons:<br /> <br /> (1)Contraction of e+e. For example in the contract verb poie/w:<br /><br />poie + ete = poiei=te no diphthong, but long epsilon (if we may call it that.)<br /><br /> (2) Compensatory lengthening. This is when a letter falls out of a word and the vowel is lengthened to compensate for what was lost. For example, in the future of the verb pa/sxw, which we were discussing above. The Indo-European form is:<br /><br />penth-s-o-mai. From this the consonant cluster -nth- drops out, and we are left with pe-so-mai. The e in pe- will lengthen to compensate for the loss of the consonants and gives us peeh-so-mai. In Greek pei/somai. Again their is no diphthongisation, but a long epsilon.<br /><br />I was surprised to find very straightforward information on how to determine whether a diphthong is spurious or genuine in Goodwin's Greek Grammar, section 8, which I here decompress and transcribe:<br /><br />________________________<br /><br />8. The diphthongs ei and ou are either genuine or spurious. <br /><br />Genuine ei, ou either belong to the earliest structure of the language, as in pei/qw, persuade (cf. its perfect pe/poiqa), or arise from contraction of e+i, as in ge/ne-i, ge/nei by birth (232). <br /><br />Spurious ei and ou arise from contraction of e+e and e+o, o+e, or o+o, as in e0poi/ei for (e0poi/ee) he made, e0poi/oun for (e0poi/eon they made; or from compensative lengthening (32), as in tiqei/j (for tiqent-j, 70) placing, tou/j (for to/n-j, 75), the accusative plural of the article.<br /><br />In the fourth century B.C. the spurious diphthongs were written like genuine ei and ou (that is, EI, OU); but in earlier times they were written E and O. See 28.<br /><br />________________________<br /><br />This all makes it seem like it would be possible to determine whether a diphthong is genuine in a verb or not, by looking at the ablaut (the different vowel grades in the forms of it's principal parts.) And to interpret a diphthong as genuine anywhere that an iota is part of a contraction. Of course, to reproduce this kind of accuracy in reading Greek, it is necessary to know the words in advance. And that is why I am proposing the construction of a list of Greek words with genuine diphthongs.<br /><br />It just occurred to me that lei/pw is another verb where the diphthong is genuine, as its perfect is le/loipa. This doesn't seem like it will be so hard, really. What do you think? Let's keep track of them.<br /><br />sincerely,<br /><br />J. Sebastian Pagani[/face][/size]<br />