[gothic-l] addendum to and

[edmundfairfax@yahoo.ca [gothic-l]]

Dear Basti,
 

The etymology of the names is immaterial. The Goths would have learnt such names through the medium of Greek or Latin, and there is no evidence that Ancient Greek or Latin <eu> would have been pronounced as "[ɛɪ̭w]." 

 While Latin and Greek had both /e/ and /e:/, Gothic evidently did not: beside /ɛ/ and /ɛ:/, both represented by <ai>, it had only /e:/ <e>, but no /e/. This would naturally result in Gothic uncertainty about how to transliterate names containing the foreign sound /e/ in the original. The question is not "why keep a digraph for something that is always pronounced as a single vowel?" but rather 'which of the vowels represented by <ai> or <e> better approximates the value in a foreign word?'
 

 Edmund
 

---In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, <setiez at ...> wrote :

 "If <ai> and <au> did in fact represent [ai] and [au], then why would a scribe have transcribed these Latin names in this way?"
 

 They are mostly Semitic names, and as someone mentioned earlier, it is hard for people who have spoken diphthongs since childhood to learn a language with mostly monophthongs. I suspect some may have pronounced Leyi (Λευι) as [lɛɪ̭'wə̭ɪ] or with some similar compromise, and that they would have caused the digraphs to remain. So the question I ask myself is: Why keep a digraph for something that is always pronounced as a single vowel?
 

 Anyway, thanks Edmund! I needed some background to understand your previous post.
 (https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Gothic-L/conversations/messages/12259 https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Gothic-L/conversations/messages/12259?soc_src=mail&soc_trk=ma)
 

 /Basti
 



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/gothic-l/attachments/20150319/a56ca7ff/attachment.htm>