by Philemon Zachariou » August 8th, 2011, 9:45 am
Following the Greek dark ages brought about by the Dorians, from the 7th c. BC to the beginning of the inscriptions period (600 BC) a spirit of national consolidation began to form in Greece and the Greeks became aware of the need to organize a system of a national education. As the basis for learning they adopted their ancestral literature, which was mainly in Homeric verse. Until 600 BC nearly all Greek literature had taken a poetic form; education had transmitted in verse the lore and morals of the race; even early philosophers gave their systems poetic dress. However, right from the outset the Greeks realized that the sounds in their ancestral Homeric literature had undergone changes that entailed particularly the loss of consonants and was thus phonetically and metrically affected. Compounding the problem was the fact that most Greek communities had no adequate alphabets or uniform education. In the early Attic alphabet (prior to the 5th c. BC) as older inscriptions show, E was used for the sounds represented later by E, H, EI, and O for the sounds represented later by Ο, Ω, ΟΥ. Schoolmasters, in their attempts to compensate for the loss of Homeric consonants, improvised prosodic symbols with which they marked syllables in words with orthographic anomalies. In some dialects they negotiated the loss by the doubling of the succeeding consonant as in ὄλνυμι > ὄλ᾽υμι > ὄλλυμι, πανρησία > πα᾽ρησία > παρρησία, ἄρσην > ἄρ᾽ην > ἄρρην, θάρσος > θάρ᾽ος > θάρρος. On the other hand, when the vowels α, ε, ο occurred before a lost sound, they wrote αι, αι, οι, the added ι being an adscript (later a subscript), which served as a silent guide, a compensatory mark analogous with the sign of the apostrophe ( ’ ) used to help retain the phonetic quality of α, ε, ο. Thus, original τὰνς ἀρχάνς became τὰις ἀρχάις, μέλανς > μέλαις, ἑνς > ἕις (εἷς), πάντς > πάν᾽ς > πάις > πᾶς. Similar concerns led Doric schoolmasters to join H and I (later H) for E, while the Athenians from the mid-5th c. BC adopted Ionic H(η) and Ω(ω) to compensate for rhythmical length by using H and Ω in place of E and O. But whereas initially the compensatory marks H and Ω were introduced to normalize versification—not speech—they gradually found their way into the alphabet, hence the confusion of E and H, and O and Ω. It is for such reasons that the symbol E from pre-classical Attic down to the beginning of the classical period, was still being used to represent was was represented later by E, H, and EI. When EI and H became iotacized, E still had a double function as a symbol representing [ε] as well as [i] sounds, with theorists and specialized readers applying the old Attic E for either [ε] or [i]. Add to these the iotacization of EI and H by Socrates’ time, and you’ll see ἱμέρα, ἡμέρα, ἑμέρα in that light. It is also for such reasons that we ΠΕΡΙΚΛΕΣ and ΠΕΡΙΚΛΗΣ, ΔΕΜΟΣΘΕΝΕΣ and ΔΗΜΟΣΘΕΝΗΣ.
Cheeres,
Philemon Zachariou