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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Question About the Letter X
In-Reply-To: bruck@actcom.co.il's message of Mon, 19 Jun 1995 16:04:23 GMT
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In article <DAFGnC.L54@actcom.co.il> bruck@actcom.co.il (Uri Bruck) writes:

>Hence, according to the Britanica, my original assertion that the Greek
>charcter X stands for the Semitic HET sound, was correct.  Latin adopted this
>character to represent the /ks/ sound.  Why they didn't adopt just the xsi 'as
>is' I can't make a guess, but they had no use for the /kh/. One reason for
>them to retain the X character might have been for writing adopted Greek
>words.

This is the problem with using encyclopaedias, rather than the specialist
literature:  They leave things out that won't affect the casual reader.

There was more than one Greek alphabet prior to Hellenistic times; the break-
down was between "East Greek" and "West Greek" alphabets.  Even in "East Greek"
scripts, there were some major differences:  Attic Greek (the speech of Athens,
the dialect taught as "Ancient Greek" in schools) did not distinguish epsilon
from eta from "spurious epsilon-iota" or omicron from omega from "spurious
omicron-upsilon" until the 4th century BCE, when the city adopted the Ionian
version of the alphabet.

Latin got its alphabet from Etruscan, which in turn got it from a *West Greek*
source--in which the letter <X> *was* /ks/, from the beginning, and /kh/ was
written <KH>.  Like the Attic alphabet, no distinction was made between epsilon
and eta, both written <E>, and <H> was used to spell /h/.
-- 
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_
