Talk:Archaic Greek alphabets

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A fact from Archaic Greek alphabets appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 28 September 2011 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that in some archaic Greek alphabets (Corinthian inscription pictured), an Ε could look like a Β, a Β like a C, a Γ like an Ι, an Ι like a Σ, or a Σ like an Μ?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2011/September. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Archaic Greek alphabets.

Wikipedia

Kaegi's iod[edit]

Kurzgefasste griechische Schulgrammatik (1884) (in German)
A Short Grammar of Classical Greek (ed. James A. Kleist, 1902)
Kaegi's Greek Grammar (republished Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2007)

Adolf Kaegi has an uncontested letter iod (p. 2) which is necessary to explain certain verb forms involving double consonants (p. 47).
Is this supposition part of current scholarship?
99.237.226.18 (talk) 17:04, 8 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Not quite sure what you mean. The /j/ glide sound in reconstructed forms such as *pʰulakjō > φυλάττω/φυλάσσω? Sure, that is commonly accepted. But it doesn't really have much to do with this article. The "j" in those forms is a reconstructed sound in Proto-Greek, but it had vanished by the time the Greek alphabet was introduced, so it was never written and was never a letter. Fut.Perf. ☼ 17:57, 8 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have been casually reading up on Greek for 40 years, and had not encountered this until buying this book on Thursday.

There is no redirect on "iod" to take readers to wherever the explanation may be.

And Iōd is still commonly used to refer to the reconstructed /j/?

99.237.226.18 (talk) 14:57, 9 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it's basically just a variant spelling of the German word Jot, the German name of the letter "J", or of yodh, the Hebrew letter name. We do have a note about it under yod, which appears to be the more common spelling in modern English (though not specifically dealing with its application to Greek), and a redirect under Jot (letter) (which leads to a remark about Greek "j" in the J article). Our actual linguistic coverage of the grammatical phenomenon should be under Proto-Greek.

There once was a very crazy person here on Wikipedia (now banned) who had an insane infatuation with that symbol, and kept inserting all sorts of made-up nonsense about it in various places of the project, so maybe that's one reason why other editors have not felt much appetite for expanding on it.

Problem is, of course, that this thing can in principle be spelled in at least nine different ways (with "i", "j" or "y" in the beginning, and with "d", "dh" or "t" in the end), and most of the resulting spellings also have different meanings, so you'd run into lots of disambiguation problems if you were to give it more explicit redirect coverage. Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:42, 9 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Vowels in Phoenician Alphabet[edit]

A table in this article showsthe Phoenician alphabet as having vowels,with aleph being eqivalent to'a' etc. But the Wikipeida articleonthe Phoenician alphabet says that this was a consonantal alphabet or abjad{iyah}. Clarification is needed. Barney Bruchstein (talk) 19:04, 21 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The table just shows the Phoenician letters that were ancestral to the Greek letters. It doesn't claim that any letters were vowels in Phoenician, just that certain Phoenician letters correspond to Greek vowel letters. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 19:11, 21 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

We could adapt the row headings a bit to forestall this misunderstanding though. Strangely, now that I look, the article doesn't actually explain the general mechanism of Greek developing vowel letters from Phoenician non-vowel letters anywhere before that point. Fut.Perf. ☼ 13:44, 22 June 2014 (UTC)c[reply]

@Future Perfect at Sunrise: See History of the Greek alphabet § Restructuring of the Phoenician abjad. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 05:57, 10 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Another medieval form of beta[edit]

This map (over there→) says the name of Great Britain is Albiōnos, but its glyph for beta is something like ɤ. Byzantine Greek variant? or misspelling with a strange form of gamma? or scribal error? — $Llywelyn II$ 04:12, 11 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It's the ου-ligature, so the whole word is "Αλουίωνος". "Αλουίων" appears to be an early Greek adaptation of "Albion" handed down via Ptolemy. Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:57, 11 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Ψ for /ks/?[edit]

I just found on Latin Wikipedia the claim that in green alphabets, Ψ is sometimes used for /ks/ – is this correct? If so, it should probably be mentioned here, too. It also means that it is not entirely correct that the green alphabets lack the additional characters that go beyond the Phoenician set. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 05:51, 10 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't seen evidence for such a usage in my main source for this article, this website. If I read it correctly, the various Ψ-like glyphs occur only for either Ψ proper (i.e. /ps/), or for /kʰ/, but not for /ks/. What does occur, however, is that /ks/ is sometimes expressed by a digraph, including whatever is the local character for /kʰ/ plus the local character for /s/. The website lists a few examples where this would involve a Ψ-like glyph for the /kʰ/ part, from Boeotia and Lokris. Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:47, 10 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Euboean section[edit]

In the image, it's written right to left, but why does it look like it's mirror writing as well? Grassynoel (talk) 05:59, 4 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, thanks for the question. That was in fact the general practice: when switching between writing directions, each letter was also mirrored accordingly. In fact, the left-facing versions you're seeing in that image were probably the original ones, as borrowed from Phoenician. I thought we had a sentence somewhere explaining this, but it turns out that was only in the main Greek alphabet article, so maybe we should add it here too. Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:10, 4 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, actually, we do have the sentence "All letters could additionally occur in a mirrored form, when text was written from right to left, as was frequently done in the earliest period", in the "glyph shapes" section. Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:12, 4 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]