Digamma

[nekkid]

Return of the Digamma?

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--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "llama_nom" <penterakt at ...> wrote:
>
>
> Hi Sean,
>
> The Gothic symbol for 90 comes from the Greek alphabet, where it was
> called KOPPA. Greek preserved certain archaic letters as numbers,
> although by the time of Wulfila, these had long ceased to be used as
> letters. Some corresponded to sounds which had once existed in Greek
> but later disappeared - e.g. DIGAMMA, orgiginally called WAU, which
> looks like F in the Roman alphabet, and came between epsilon & zeta,
> but stood for /w/. Digamma had the numerical value 6, and
> corresponds to Gothic *QAIRTHRA.
>
> KOPPA looks similar to the Gothic sign for 90. It was never a
> distinct phoneme in Greek, but was taken along with the other letters
> from Phoenecian, where it stood for the uvular plosive /q/ (Compare
> the Hebrew QOPH/KUF and Arabic QAF). In Greek it was at first used
> for /k/ before back vowels, but eventually replaced by KAPPA, and
> only survived as a numeral. (Modern Greek however has replaced the
> old numeral KOPPA with Z.) Our Q (q) has the same origin, and the
> same place in the alphabet, between P and R.
>
> The other purely numerical sign in Gothic, which looks like the runic
> T, is in fact derived from the archaic Greek letter SAMPI, which may
> once have had the values /ks/ or /ss/, but survived into Classical
> times only as the number 900. This was probably a Greek invention,
> hence its position at the end of the alphabet - although it might
> have been based on an earlier Phoenecian-derived letter SAN.
>
> I don't think that koppa/90 would have had the name AIHWS 'horse'
> (<Germanic *ehwaz), since this is already taken by the fifth letter,
> E, according to the Vienna-Salzburg codex (?10th century), where the
> name is spelt phonetically in Roman characters: EYZ. Given the
> resemblance of the 900 symbol to the T-rune, I guess that might have
> been called *TIUS (the Gothic cognate of the Norse & Old English
> names for that rune). But I don't know. Maybe the Greek names were
> borrowed. Or maybe new Gothic names were invented based on their
> previous sound values in Greek, or the values they were supposed to
> have had...
>
> You can find more details on archaic Greek letters here:
>
> http://ptolemy.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/nonattic.html
> http://ptolemy.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/numerals.html
>
> ...or by doing a search for KOPPA, SAN, SAMPI and DIGAMMA.
>
>
> And for a good comparative table of runes, including the Gothic names:
> http://titus.fkidg1.uni-frankfurt.de/didact/idg/germ/runennam.htm
>
>
> Llama Nom  <<




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