How to tell if you're reading too much Greek

[mwh]

Today I was looking on the library shelves for Aristophanes and was puzzled not to find him. I was looking for him after Aristotle.

[bedwere]

I hope you can still tell whether you already had your ἄριστον or not.

[Timothée]

Two weeks ago I was unable to find Ksenophon, which was really puzzling.

[mwh]

You a phonetician or what? Do you look for Zenodotus under D? At least in our languages Xenophon begins with an X (as in XYZ or X-rated, not as in a X-squared test), unlike in Italian. Italian still throws me on occasion: I puzzled for a moment over Ilizia. (How to tell if you're not reading enough Italian?)

[Timothée]

Do you look for Zenodotus under D?

Wouldn't it rather be under z (ζ pronounced [zd], cf. Vox Graeca p. 53ff.)? In Finnish we don't Latinise Greek names, but for some reason we write Ξ as <ks>, and Φ as <f> (which I really hate). However, this confusion may mean that I have not read enough Greek — or too much in case I search it after N.

My teacher said she was puzzled for a moment in a conference when an English lecturer said [hai'peiʃa].

[mwh]

Sorry, from your name I assumed you were French-speaking, not Finnish. (Both, no doubt.) Does romanized Russian do the same, then? I know it's Aleksand-; also when it’s initial, presumably, e.g. Ksavier.

[jeidsath]

I've seen Ксенофонт romanized as Xenofont.

[Timothée]

No, I'm just a somewhat Francophile Finn. I suppose any Finn would guess what's my name (maybe you might, too) from my alias, as it's barely hidden. Paul D. is a friend of mine.

The (Russian) Cyrillic alphabet has no x (= ks), its х (derived from Greek chi) denoting roughly the same sound as in German Bach. So the murderer of Rasputin was Феликс Юсупов (Feliks Yusupov), and Александр(а) (Aleksandr[a]) is a common Russian name. Russian ф (f), on the other hand, derives partly from Greek θ, which can be seen in a familiar Russian name Фёдор (Fyodor) < Θεόδωρος. Note how the stress has firmly remained on the same syllable (ё is always stressed in Russian) as it was (is) in Greek!

[Hylander]

Before the Russian Revolution, the Russian alphabet used to have a letter Θ, but it was pronounced the same as Russian and Greek Ф, i.e., /f/. The Russian Θ was used in Greek-derived words, mostly from the ecclesiastical vocabulary, including the name Фёдор, which was written Θедоръ, with a silent letter ъ at the end that represented a short u vowel that had been many lost centuries earlier but was preserved in writing at the end of every word ending in a consonant. (The diacritical mark over the ё changing it to an /o/ sound is optional and often absent from printed texts; see, e.g., link below.) There were several other duplicative letters for similar ecclesiastical words and names taken over from Greek--an upsilon, for example.

Apparently, the eastern Slavs, when evangelized from Constantiople, didn't have native sounds corresponding to Byzantine Greek φ and θ for Greek loan words, but had more difficulty pronouncing the Byzantine Greek θ than the φ, and so assimilated θ to φ. (Contemporary Russian has a "native" /f/ sound, but it is the result of allophonic devoicing of the /v/ sound, which in turn is a relatively recent development from native /w/.

One of the first things the Communists did on taking power was to reform Russian spelling along lines that had long been advocated by philologists/linguists, by eliminating the superfluous Greek letters and dropping the final ъ, which was put to a different use. Even before the revolution, these changes had been resisted by the Russian Church and conservative elements in Russian society, and some books printed in émigré circles (e.g., in Paris) continued to preserve the old spellings at least until the 1950s. Even before the changes, the Russian spelling system struck an almost perfect balance between phonetics and phonemics, and now the anomalies are very few.

[mwh]

Interesting. But my inconsequential little anecdote has gotten serious real fast. My liking for indirection and obliquity (fostered by Callimachus) wouldn’t allow me to explicitly mention Senofonte, and I didn’t explain Ilizia, but how many immediately saw Ειλειθυια in it without a moment’s thought?

I seem to remember looking in an index for Jim Zetzel and looking for him at the end of T. I must have been thinking of Tzetzes, and now I can’t help pronouncing Zetzel as if it were Tzetzel. (The tsetse fly may have abetted, but I pronounce that without the first sibilant, automatically dissimilating.)

[Hylander]

Thanks for solving the Ilizia puzzle, which left me scratching my head. But I would have thought that θ would be rendered as just "t" in Italian, as in Teocrito.

[mwh]

Yes but Timothée already obliquely pointed us to Ipazia for Hypatia, just as Ignatius becomes Ignazio, or gratia grazia. It’s the –i- that makes the difference. Here I guess the (?*)–yia is reduced to simple –ia, resulting in –zia (z of course not as in “zia” but voiceless—/ts/ as in my pronunciation of “Tzetzes” in fact!) But I don’t really know.