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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: u-psilon
In-Reply-To: hvlcrt@marge.cs.mcgill.ca's message of 20 Apr 1995 08:07:40 GMT
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Date: Mon, 24 Apr 1995 00:26:40 GMT
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In article <3n54oc$jdd@sifon.cc.mcgill.ca> hvlcrt@marge.cs.mcgill.ca
(Harry VALCOURT) writes:

>Bruce McMenomy (mcmenomy@halcyon.com) wrote:

>: You may not know anything about Greek, but your linguistics is sound.  
>: The best available info in Greek is that this is exactly right.  Another 
>: data point from the Romance languages, BTW, is the fact that 'Y' in 
>: Spanish is called "ygriega" -- Greek u.

>In French it's called " y grec" which means greek u too.

Given that the name of the letter in both languages is [i], I would think it
obvious that the name in both languages means "Greek i" (that is, "i as the
Greeks spell it, not the way *we* do").

The grapheme was adopted into Latin fairly late, to represent the sound still
present in Koine Greek of the time, a high front rounded vowel [y], in words
borrowed into Latin.  Had it been consistently [i] at the time, there would
have been no need for the grapheme to be borrowed, since there was already a
grapheme available to represent this sound.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
