At 9:40 PM -0600 1/22/97, Stephen C. Carlson wrote: >At 03:52 1/22/97 -0600, Carl W. Conrad wrote: >>At 9:27 PM -0600 1/21/97, Lee R. Martin wrote: >>>Pardon my intrusion, but it seems to me that the iota in Jerusalem, >>>Jordan, Jesus, John, et. al. is a pronounced as a consonant, not a vowel >>>(corresponding to the Hebrew consonant yod). The only way it could be >>>pronounced as a vowel is to add a syllable, e.g. ee-er-u-sa-lem, >>>ee-or-dan, ee-ey-sus etc. >> >>I think that this MAY be true, but how do we KNOW it for sure? What I said >>yesterday was that editors, by putting a smooth breathing before the >>upper-case Iota, seem to be indicating pronunciation as a vowel. That the >>Romans used an I for both vowel and consonant we do know, but what evidence >>have we for Greek pronunciation of initial I as a consonant at any time? > >I think that whatever evidence we have, it is actually *against* initial >I being a consonant/semivowel. First, this semivowel (IPA [j]; English >"y") is not phonemic in Greek. Second, the initial y- sound from the >parent language changed to either a h- or Z-. Third, some existing Greek >words, though not of Semitic origin, carry the accent on the initial iota, >indicating a vowel: e.g. I)/AKXOS, another name for Dionysus. Therefore, >I would reluctantly conclude that the initial iota is probably a vowel. An additional argument in favor of the position taken here by Stephen, although only by analogy, is the fact that the Latin consonantal U (pronounced like our "w," commonly spelled with a "V") was transliterated into Greek in the same period as OU: e.g. VERGILIUS --> OUERGILIOS, VARUS --> OUAROS. This would seem to indicate that the only way Hellenistic Greek could represent these consonantal sounds outside their repertory of consonants was as vowels. Carl W. Conrad Department of Classics, Washington University One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130 (314) 935-4018 cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/