Autonym of Mosopeleas-Ouesperies-Ofos

[Rankin, Robert L]

The history of "8" as [w] or [u], French "ou" is interesting.  It's Greek actually.  It is an upsilon written on top of an omicron.  In Greek the upsilon had taken on the pronunciation of [u-umlaut], so the actual sound [u], as in 'boot' had to be written as a digraph.  As in French and some Slavic, the digraph <ou> was chosen, but unlike those languages, the Greeks elected to write it for a period of time as a single symbol, with one of the letters over the other.  This 8-like symbol (with the open top) was also taken into the Cyrillic alphabet and this explains why [u] is written with a symbol that looks like <Y> in Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, etc.  Their Y is derived from the Greek 8.  I'm afraid I can't elucidate the colonial French usage of it during the 17th century, but that's its source.
 
bob

________________________________

From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu on behalf of David Costa
Sent: Mon 3/5/2007 2:16 PM
To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
Subject: Re: Autonym of Mosopeleas-Ouesperies-Ofos



That's not Algonquianist usage -- that's French missionary practice of the
17th & 18th centuries. They used it for Algonquian languages, but they also
used it when writing Iroquoian languages.

As Bob points out, it's equivalent to French 'ou' -- thus, it's primarily
used for /w/, /o(:)/ or /u(:)/, depending on context, but sometimes it's
even used for /w/ + schwa, or schwa + /w/.

Technically, it's not exactly an '8' the way the French wrote it -- they
actually wrote it as an '8' with an open top, often a descending character.
But to make life simple, it's usually printed with plain '8'.

Dave



>> Pardon me; I think I was confused on a point of orthography.  I had been
>> thinking the Algonquianist use of 8 was for schwa; I seem to recall now that
>> it is either for /wa/ or some kind of long /oo/.  I believe the @ sign is
>> what we've been using for schwa, isn't it?

> W usually next to a vowel.  [u] generally otherwise.