Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 October 30

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October 30

Consistent Historical spelling of Greek Letters?

Has the spelling of the spelled out name of the Greek Letters been consistent since Plato's time? For example, I would *guess* that Delta has always been Delta-Epsilon-Lambda-Tau-Alpha, but has Alpha always been Alpha-Lambda-Phi-Alpha, or was it *ever* Alpha-Lambda-Pi-Eta-Alpha? More specifically for what I care about, have any of the letters in the "consonant-eta" family "Beta, Zeta, Theta" *ever* been spelled as consonate-Epsilon-Tau-Alpha rather than the more standard "consonate-Eta-Tau-Alpha". (Also, was there ever a time when Psi would have been spelled Psi-Sigma-Iota rather than Psi-Iota?)Naraht (talk) 13:39, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

I don't know knowing about Greek, but it is likely that spellings were not consistent historically, the same as in English. See Spelling of Shakespeare's name for an example. -- Q Chris (talk)

Naraht -- I don't think there's much information on letter names before the Hellenistic period, but in early Greek alphabet variants when [ps] and [ks] were not written with single letters, then they were actually usually written as phi-sigma and chi-sigma. In alphabet variants without omega and where "H" was heta (including Athens before 403 BC), then of course the letters omicron and epsilon were used to write both long and short vowels. The adjective suffixes to letter names (e/psilon, o/micron, y/psilon, o/mega) were not added until after vowel mergers occurred at a fairly late period... AnonMoos (talk) 18:18, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

The reason that I ask is that I see some greek letter organizations (US Fraternities and Sororities) which use alternate spellings and it really grates on my nerves. The longest standing one is the fact that the Coat of Arms for Delta Sigma Theta (Founded in 1913) spells the Theta as Theta-Epsilon-Tau-Alpha where everywhere else is Theta-Eta-Tau-Alpha. Most of the others are local groups which have come into existence within the last decade or so.Naraht (talk) 18:31, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Theta in Modern Greek is Θήτα as far as I know. --Jayron32 19:28, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Unfortunately, there seems to be no work dedicated to how the names of the Greek letters come into being, who was the first to use them and to list the entire alphabet with the letter names, and how they've changed through the time. I'd like to know if there is one.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 22:17, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

I don't even know that for English. And English even has the zee-zed separation. And how exactly do you spell 'R', 'Arr'?Naraht (talk) 11:36, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

See here. --Jayron32 12:47, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

The early history of the Latin-alphabet letter names is fairly simple -- for vowels, sonorants and fricatives (and "x" which includes a fricative), the lettername was just the sound pronounced long or syllabic: [aː], [eː], [iː], [oː], [uː], [f̩], [l̩], [m̩], [n̩], [r̩], [s̩], [ks̩]. The sonorants and fricatives later had an "e" prefixed to their names (instead of being syllabic consonants, which didn't exist in the ordinary Latin sound system): [ef], [el], [em], [en], [er], [es], [eks]. The names of the other consonants were mainly the sound of that consonant followed by "e": [be], [ke], [de], [ge], [he], [pe], [te]. The letters "k" and "q" were [ka] and [ku] because "k" mainly occurred before the vowel "a" in Latin orthography, and "q" before "u". There have been various complications later on, due to borrowing "y" and "z" from the Greek alphabet, splitting off "j" from "i", and "v" and "w" from "u", the [h] sound disappearing in Romance, etc. etc. AnonMoos (talk) 15:33, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

Oddly enough, what you said covered every letter *except* R. :)Naraht (talk) 15:52, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

I think it covered all 21 letters of the early Latin alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X. The name of the letter "r" was originally syllabic [r̩], then [er]. It's still [er] (or rather [eʁ]) in French, but became [a(ː)r] in Middle English due to the same sound change which resulted in "Clark" from "clerk", the pronunciation of "sergeant" etc. AnonMoos (talk) 16:22, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

Anonmoos and U sort of as well. But why english is "you" for the pronounciation rather than "u", good question. The american Z follows the "T" rule, the British, closer to the Zeta. and "Y" being "Why" *really* not sure. (unlike everyone else in Europe who shows the greek history)Naraht (talk) 16:43, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

The 20th letter of the classical Latin alphabet had the shape V, but its predominant function was to write the vowel [u], and it was named accordingly. The graphemes (visual shape variants) u and v, and i and j, didn't really begin to be distinguished by function until the 17th century, and they weren't always considered formally separate letters of the alphabet until even later (see File:Sampler by Elizabeth Laidman, 1760.jpg for example). The modern English lettername of U is [juː] because that's how classical Latin [uː], which developed into medieval French [y] (i.e. what is written in German as ü), ends up in modern English. AnonMoos (talk) 00:51, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

Naraht -- I'm not too sure why fraternities and sororities feel the need to spell Greek letter names in Greek letters, but I would strongly suspect that Θετα is due to ignorance, rather than to a revival of the pre-403 BC early alphabet. AnonMoos (talk) 23:44, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Mostly as a way to indicate what the letters in a fancy way are without showing the actual words which start with those letters which are likely to have esoteric meaning. Naraht (talk) 11:36, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

We have something about this topic at Greek alphabet#Letter names. In particular, the group of letters today spelled in -i ("pi", "xi", "psi", "chi", "phi") were originally spelled with -ei (epsilon-iota). This reflects their original pronunciation, which would have been with /e:/. Epsilon, omikron, upsilon and omega had not merely different spellings of their names, but entirely different names (rendering just the simple vowel sounds they originally stood for). Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:55, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

Thank you very much. This gives me an idea of how they really did change, which makes the idea of a Theta-Epsilon-Tau-Alpha even less likely.Naraht (talk) 15:29, 31 October 2017 (UTC)