Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 October 6

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

October 6

Greek era

[1]

Is this written in ancient Greek or a more modern form? I'm on a slow Internet connection, so I can't load anything except the text-only version (which, judging by the English transcriptions of certain names, is a bad OCR job), and I'm not seeing a preface in that version. It's somehow related to Antiphon (orator), so it would make sense if this were in ancient Greek, but maybe it's a modern translation or something of the sort. [I'm also unsure how it got the Latin title.] I checked WorldCat, but [2] claims that it's written in modern Greek, while [3] says ancient, and clearly they're referring to the same book.

Nyttend backup (talk) 17:06, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

I don't know much Greek, but I see instances of iota subscript, which I believe mark it as Classical. --ColinFine (talk) 17:14, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

That appears to be a concordance of the words in Antiphon's surviving works, so the lemmata and quoted contexts are clearly in ancient (Attic) Greek. The title and apparatus are in Latin because that's how things were done at the time (and still are in some cases; cf. the Oxford Classical Texts series). It's assumed that anyone who would be interested in such a thing can read Latin, no matter his or her native language. Deor (talk) 17:31, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

• It is apparently rendered in (post-)Attic Greek given the use of μητερ (not ματερ) for "mother". It seems like a later transcription in Koine, as if one were reading Chaucer in modern translation. The large number of biblical words as one skims the text seems odd, as the Septuagint apparently post-dated the Orator. You'll need a specialist. μηδείς (talk) 19:51, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

I'm reminded of the anecdote about some rather unworldly CofE Bishop who, when chatting to his gardener, would follow all the Greek aphorisms and words he used with English translations, recognising that a person in such a lowly position had probably not learned classical Greek, but didn't bother to translate the Latin, because of course everybody understood that. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.217.210.199 (talk) 19:56, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Phi or chi; which letter came first??

In the way the Greek alphabet is best known today, phi comes before chi. But some sources say that in Western Greek dialects, chi came before phi. Any reason for this?? Georgia guy (talk) 17:12, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

In Bright and Daniels, The World's Writing Systems, Table 21.2 General Comparative Table of Early Greek Alphabets (8th-7th c. B.C.E.) lists Chi before Phi, while Table 21.3 Detailed Comparison of Eastern and Western Alphabets lists Phi first; but I can't find any discussion of the order in that section (by Pierre Swiggers) at all. --ColinFine (talk) 17:31, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Georgia_guy -- when the sound [pʰ] was written with a single letter, then everywhere in Greek-speaking areas basically the same shape was used (allowing for local variations). By contrast, when [kʰ] was written with a single letter, two quite different shapes were used, one "X"-like, and the other "Ψ"-like (though with straight lines, and sometimes having a form like File:Alph. Ahiram lettre 11.svg). In the Etruscan alphabet, the letter Φ comes before the "Ψ"-shaped [kʰ] (see Old Italic script). AnonMoos (talk) 03:52, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

That's psi, which was pronounced like the aspirated k in Western Greek. Psi came after phi and chi in all versions of the alphabet. But this is about the order of phi and chi, not psi. Georgia guy (talk) 14:41, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

Whatever -- the names of the letters are attested much later than the letters themselves (and some of the adjectival suffixes to letter names, such as e/psilon, y/psilon, o/mega, o/micron date from an even later period, after a number of mergers of vowel sounds had occurred). We don't know the names of the letters ca. 700 B.C., and you're making an assumption (which may or may not be justified) that the fork-like letter representing the sounds [ps] in some alphabet variants is somehow the "same" as the fork-like letter representing the sound [kʰ] in other alphabet variants. It's a pretty safe bet that in Greek-speaking areas where a fork-shaped letter wrote a [kʰ] sound, that letter did not have the name "psi"!

Instead of using possibly anachronistic letter names in a rather confusing manner, why don't you specify exactly what you're trying to ask in the form of unambiguous letter-shape / sound-value pairs? AnonMoos (talk) 17:23, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

What I want to know is the reason for inconsistency in order, not sound. That is, I want to know why chi (not psi) came before phi in Western Greek alphabets but after phi in Eastern Greek alphabets. Georgia guy (talk) 18:23, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

If you use the Hellenistic-era letter-names of the Ionian alphabet alone (without any further explanation) to apply to non-Ionian alphabets of pre-Hellenistic periods, then unfortunately for you, other people must make assumptions in order to try to figure out what you might possibly mean. You could spare us this vague ambiguous muddle if you could be bothered to specify the letter of a particular shape which was used to write a particular sound in a specified variant of the early Greek alphabet (without getting involved with the distracting issue of the letter-names, which are unknown during early periods, and confusing when applied to letter-shapes which have drastically different sound-values in some forms of early Greek than they did in Hellenistic Ionian). AnonMoos (talk) 21:44, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

AnonMoos, do you have any arguments that support that the Western and Eastern Greek letters that look alike that come after upsilon are not the same letter?? Please focus on phi and chi. Georgia guy (talk) 22:20, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

Look at a table of the Carian alphabet to have your mind blown with respect to what should be assumed to be the "same" letter.. AnonMoos (talk) 14:41, 9 October 2017 (UTC)