Re: Greek

[robert <http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert>]

Thank goodness for the phonetic alphabet.

And we should also be thankful that Greek is not a tonal language.

Actually, I don't know if the Lingthusiam people addresses how multiple
tonal characters interact with each other.  That problem gets pretty
complicated pretty quickly, since such interactions are complicated
without tones.

 > From: Noelle <noelle>
 > Date: Sun, 5 Dec 2021 18:44:30 -0800 (PST)
 >
 > C.K.S. in , writes: This isn't actually a correction, 
 > because I don't know for sure, but I'm linguistically curious, 
 > having studied modern Greek and lived in Athens for a few years. 
 > What you and other letter writers are saying would be pronounced 
 > 'mu' and 'nu,' the Greeks would pronounce 'mee' and 'nee." This 
 > touches on my fascination with the transcribing of Greek letter 
 > 'ypsilon'. This capitalization of this letter is Y, but its lower 
 > case is u. it is pronounced in Greek as 'ee.' There is no letter 'u' 
 > in Greek; to get the sound of 'u,' you have to combine the letters 
 > omicron and ypsilon, which looks like 'ou' (and would be 'OY' in 
 > caps).
 > 
 > I don't know the story behind this, but I suspect it might have some 
 > parallels to the 'barbarian' story. Greeks actually don't have a 
 > letter for the 'b' sound either, they have to combine their letters 
 > 'mee' and 'pi.' This is because they apparently did not make such 
 > sounds in their language, and had to find a way to transcribe it 
 > when they were confronted with uncouth interlopers from the north, 
 > hence the genesis of the term barbarian (essentially meaning 'one of 
 > those uncouth interlopers from the north who keep making that sound 
 > we Greeks don't speak').
 > 
 > V & Z respond: As chance would have it, (Z) has a friend whose 
 > specialty is ancient Greece, and so he speaks ancient Greek, modern 
 > Greek, and English fluently (among other languages). He says that 
 > modern Greeks do indeed pronounce 'mu' and 'nu' as 'mee' and 'nee,' 
 > but that the English pronunciation, and also the ancient Greek 
 > pronunciation, is 'moo' and 'noo.'