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Can someone tell me what that ν is called that is used by Pharr in 'Homeric Greek for beginners' in paragraph 685?

It's in the sentence 'ν of course regularly becomes -ᾱ'. Or am I misreading it?

I'm not quite sure what you're asking. Are you wondering what the name of that little circle under the nu is? Or what it means? It seems to be simply Pharr's way of indicating a certain consonants when they're vocalic. If you're wondering about the phonology concerned, it makes sense to me but I have no idea how to describe it.

It's the ν with the little circle underneath that bugs me. What does it indicate?

<browsing through Pharr>

Wait, it is explained in paragraph 597. But now I have to find out how to type it on my Mac. Hmm.

I think I answered that. The circle indicates that the consonant is acting like a vowel (which is why it can then be replaced by alpha).
I don't think it's a standard notation -- at any rate, I'm having trouble finding anyone else who uses it. But Pharr has some notes on it earlier: paragraph 597 "Sonant Consonants"

I think it is a standard notation.
The little circle under a consonant is used to indicate a vocalic or sonant consonant.
(Vowels with a little-upside-down-v under it are called consonantal vowels.)
In English you could compare it to the consonant Y in 'yes' becoming vocalic in 'why.'
The accusative sg. ending of the 3rd declension is Nu but also shows up as Alpha (vocalic Nu.)
Check out Pharr paragraphs 597 and 598.
(Paragraph 600 about the consonantal Iota.)

Bert, I'm curious. Where else have you seen it used that way? I spent far too long searching the net trying to figure out more about this (because at this point I was intrigued) and mostly got frustrated with my own incompetence. A few sites on Indo-European did use this notation, but it's evidently not part of the current IPA system, which uses the combining ring for something else, and a little line (n̩) for syllabic consonants. Maybe it's a historical linguistics thing? (And is a syllabic consonant the same thing as a vocalic one?)

Check out Smyth 20 and 35 b and c.
Yes, a syllabic consonant is the same thing as a vocalic one.
I have seen the symbol for consonantal Iota for instance quite a bit but the one for vocalic consonant appears to be not as common.

(You wrote

and a little line (n̩) for syllabic consonants

The symbol you wrote between parenthesis appears as gobbldeygook on my screen. )

Still, I need to know how to type it too. Or else copy it from a site. Can anyone point me in some direction?

Hi,

perispomenon wrote:Still, I need to know how to type it too. Or else copy it from a site. Can anyone point me in some direction?

Unicode has a "combining ring below," which is character 0325 (805 in decimal numbers), but it looks nice with some fonts but horrible with others.

ν?

This post shows up in Gentium on my computer and this looks pretty nice. I got this by writing the nu and then &# 805; without the space. I'm not sure how to type it other than using these html codes.

Thymios

Thank you; I copied it to a textfile, so I can paste it when I need it.

Thanks again.