[noemon]

During the 16th century, 2 English teachers in Cambridge, Mr Cheke & Mr Smith decided unilaterally to teach the Greek language using the English sounds for the letters instead of the Greek sounds for the letters of the Greek alphabet. This started from a satirical joke play by Erasmus(hence Erasmian) where a lion and a bear mock each other about their pronunciation of Greek. Erasmus who himself never used the so-called Erasmian as he neither invented it, nor did he advocate for a change in the teaching of Greek either.

In fact, in a letter to John Laskaris as reported by John Pickering, "On the Pronunciation of the Greek Language", Erasmus requests from Laskaris more "Greek native tutors to come fill Professorship roles of the Greek language in western European Universities so that the proper pronunciation of the language can be taught".

This, of course, did not deter Cheke & Smith(the 2 teachers in Cambridge) from inventing their own Greeklish alphabet based on English, this, after all, is part of the series of the replacement theory we have discussed previously with Potemkin and Tainari of western cultural appropriation and fetish. "You natives need to be the way that we imagine you to be" & "If we need to beat sense into you that your alphabet & music(see Farya Faraji) was originally English, German or just not-Greek, then so be it".

Cheke & Smith did not just invent Greeklish, they also called it the proper way and derided the native Greek alphabet as the sounds of 'barbarians', a practice we witness today among the Erasmian successors of this tradition(barbarian interchanging with "nationalist"). This kind of thing persists to the modern day and is making headway into Greece as well(as proper house slaves), even though the entire theory has been thoroughly debunked by Buth, Teodorsson, Karagounis, Benjamin Kantor and so many more and even though several non-Greek Classical departments are already using Buth(effectively Greek proper, please note both the blog post and the comments are interesting).

Anyhow, to justify their radically supremacist view that the Greek alphabet originally sounded English, German, a combination thereof, or later to be turned to "at least not Greek", Cheke, Smith, Blass tried to find justifications within ancient texts. As we have seen with other revisionist theories such as Afrocentrism(Cleopatra was Black, not Greek), "Macedonism"(Alexander was Slavic, not Greek), Orientalism(rebetiko music is Ottoman, not Greek, even though it does not even exist in Turkey); the protagonist does not really have to provide evidence for the Slavic, African, English or German part but merely question the Greekness of that Greek something(in this case the alphabet) enough so that the relative spectator can fill in the blanks themselves, practically that is the best they can do anyway, cause where can you really find evidence of Alexander the Slav, Cleopatra the Nubian and Euclid the Germanic Anglo-Saxon? It 'd be in vain, so the only way can come by negating rather than proving. Of course, at the time, they had very little ancient texts, no epigraphy and no archeology. So their POV was also extremely limited to misinterpreting clues of information from little snippets here and there.

In the subsequent centuries, the collation of epigraphy and Greek literature permitted the more rigorous & comparative approach on the subject of Greek dialectical & phonetic divergence, Randal Buth, Teodorsson, and other Greek or not boys demonstrated quite conclusively that the historical Greek pronunciation of the Greek alphabet is 100% accurate up until certainly 300BCE and 90% accurate phonetically with "inconsequential changes"('adiaphora' as Randall Buth puts it) further back in time. Randall Buth also informed Luke Ranieri, the inventor of Lucian(and a proponent of Erasmian) during one of their debates in the ibiblio forum(archived by Ranieri as the forum no longer exists) that when he sees the change of vowel length in epigraphy, that does not mean that it is actively happening as Luke assumes but that it has already happened as speech precedes writing by quite a lot(centuries in fact especially when the changes are so subtle & even more so when we are dealing with autistic-type of people like the copywriters who maintain their traditional orthography as all calligraphists/carver's of letters do even if it does not correspond to actual speech) and as such what Luke translates as 1st-5th CE length loss in Koine is actually 3rd-1st BCE according to Buth for the Koine and therefore certainly way earlier for Attic. Thus placing the historically native pronunciation well into the classical era.

More importantly, Buth also refused to accept Luke's system even though Luke was happy to accept Buth's and literally begged for a compromise. Buth did not compromise because he finds Ranieri's theory as invalid & totally artificial(a word he uses during their debate) pure and simple.

Randall Buth of course makes sense because we mark a seminal point in Attic at 402 BCE (the adoption of Ionic letters in Athens) and another seminal point at 320BCE(Koine-Common language established by Alexander & Successors). Lots to be said about these 2 events, that I shall not get into right now, except that for which I cannot really help myself...

Open parenthesis
I will only mention that Attic was officially proclaimed by Philip of Macedon as the 'common tongue' but also as the Received Pronunciation consequently becoming the standard common(koine) tongue of all the subsequent Greek states, and people, the Bible, was used to write the original New Testament, the Septuagint which also became at some point the only version of the Torah accessible to a significant part of the Jewish community for some centuries. Attic is set as the RP for state usage, rhetoric, education, law, etcetera. This standardized duality operates on a loop allowing for slang & Mancunian for example but reinforcing a standard intelligibility, we see this in the modern states when everyone has adopted this policy of diglossia with all countries setting RP. Attic RP exists from 402BCE(Euclidean reforms setting RP) until 1453 and then again from 1840's-1976. During the Ottomans schooling did not entirely vanish, we still have schools running but at a much lower ratio for the first couple of centuries, and as they pick up steam so do the revolutions as well, all 123 of them.

Classic Latin on the other hand stopped being taught as a state standard RP about 1000 years earlier than 1453, thus leading to the divergence of Latin to Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etcetera.
Close Parenthesis.

Instead, I will examine & counter Sidney P Allen's arguments for the letter B(Vita).

Sidney Allen is treated like a Holy Prophet(lots of Erasmians, to avoid argument, just write "See Allen", you will see proof of this in the subsequent posts where we take on Luke Ranieri and the inhabitants of the 'Latin Exchange'), even though his book is really poor(75 pages for 24 ancient Greek letters) but it is like a little collated version of the Erasmian Greeklish fallacies minus the explicitly racist arguments. Funnily, Allen the linguist, does not even use IPA to render the phonemes! Go figure.

I came across Allen's arguments by proxy.

And since they looked so ridiculous at first glance, even to a non-linguist like myself, I decided to put the counter-arguments I came up with rather instantaneously down in PoFo for posterior memory.

Right oh....

Ancient Greek letter beta was pronounced as /b (as in English bit) probably until the 2nd century CE. Its pronunciation started shifting to fricative [v] in various places at different times. Evidence for this comes from the following:

Reality, β has been v for far longer(100% until 600 BCE) and possibly forever. Assertion for assertion.

The below is a Crown Jewel, any idiot online cites this argument with a certain type of smugness:

Cratinus (5th c. BC), in a surviving fragment of comedy (in Dionysalexandros) states the following: "o d' hliqios wsper probaton bh bh legwn badizei" (and the fool goes about like a sheep saying "be be"). If β is pronounced as [b] and η eta as long [e], we get the sound attributed to the animal by contemporary Greeks ("beeh-beeh"). If the letters are pronounced as in Modern Greek, we get "vi-vi", which does not sound like a sheep at all, by any stretch of the imagination.

The fool that is being made fun of says 'veve', because he is a fool! You fool! when he should be saying something else(.ie bee-bee). The joke on the fool does not make sense if the fool is making the sheep sound perfectly! Why would he then be a fool? Remember this argument because it becomes relevant later again when the author cites Aristotle and a secondary argument will be added on top of this further below.

A little note here: H was used to write both E(elephant) and I(India) in Cratinus's time, in the old Attic alphabet prior to the Euclidean reforms in 402 BCE when the Ionic alphabet was adopted in Athens and the Attic alphabet dropped. Eventually, its(H) use as an I(india) won over its use as an E(elephant). But my focus today will be on the letter β rather than the letter Heta.

In fact, Plato, in Cratylus(418a) complains that people are iotacising, confusing iota(ι) for ητα & ει, thinking of them as grander beings(.ie longer iotas) as per standard Modern Greek.

He then relates that people write imera with HMERA or EMERA, wanting "to tame the day" as ημερος=domesticated and ηρεμος=calm in modern Greek. Iotacism did not happen in the Hellenistic times or Byzantine times, it had already happened in Plato's time.

Anyway, let's carry on with Allen's Bita arguments.

Aristophanes (ca. 450 - ca. 388 BC), in a similar fashion says: "quein me mellei kai keleuei bh legein" (he is going to sacrifice me and tells me to say "ba").

This makes no sense. The only question one can ask is "and"? or "what the heck are you on about"? How does this prove β as English b instead of Greek v?

The act of writing so in English, or rather Greeklish?

He also uses the presumably alliterative phrase "pinein kai binein", which would be alliterative only if both initial letters (pi and beta) were of the same type, i.e., plosive (beta pronounced as fricative [v] would not work in this case).

"Presumably, eh"? Shameless. In terms of consonantal identity, p,v,f are not only consonants but the very particular consonants called labials(lips required). In Greek they are all homophonic, they belong to the same sonic class(labials) and also replace each other all the time.

Moreover, why wouldn't pinein(drinking) and vinein(fucking) not work as wordplay in this case? or work somehow less that pinein and binein? Notice fricative 'fucking' cognate with fricative 'vinein', from vasin, anavasin, anavatis(.ie horse rider).

Besides, what on earth would binein be? Mpinein does not exist as a meaningful term.

Cicero (106 - 43 BC), identifies the pronunciation of "binei~" with that of the Latin bini.

EDIT: I had not read Cicero's full quote, intentionally nitpicked by Allen and all these people. Here it is:

U. Primum est, quod ex tot Grammatices scriptoribus nemo varietatis
huius facit mentionem. Hoc si leve est, dicam aliud. M. Tullius in epistola
quadam ad Paetum, ut demonstret eandem vocem apud alios obscoenam
esse, quae apud alios sit verecunda, nec in verbo turpitudinem esse sed
in sensu loquentis, producit bini et Bívei , quae Latinis sit pudica, Graecis
obscoena. Atqui si Bível sonabat tum Graecis, quod vulgo sonat hodie,
non erat vox eadem apud utranque gentem, nihilo magis quam apud
Latinos bini et vini.
L. Probabile est quod narras.

Cicero puts the nail on the coffin, he relates Greek βινειν with Latin bini. He says that certain words sound similar but mean different things(the former Greek means to copulate and the latter Latin means "paired group") and he cites Latin 'bini et vini' as examples of things that sound similar in Latin but mean different things.

Since we know for a fact that Classical Latin vini=wini. The only value for bini similar to wini can be vini. A plosive bilabial [b] does not sound similar to wi but fricative vi does sound similar to wi and many people confuse them still even to the present day as in wikipedia/vikipedia.

Moreover, not just Cicero but the whole of Italy before the shift of Latin V from w(γoui) to v(vest). This is more proof that Latin B sounded as [v] during his time than the other way around. Especially when you look at it from the time that Cicero actually lived(1st BCE). This makes more sense than Latins not even having a letter for [v] (the second letter of the original Greek and Phoenician alfavets pronounced in both as VET), we will see a lot more evidence for this later.

Curious question: Why does the author assume apriori that modern-day [b] as is in bread is an unshakable fact of life since the beginning of time?

Latin used the letter B to represent Greek letter B = [v] just like the Greeks used Phoenician letter B=[v], because they were identical both in form and sound, not only by Cicero but many other countless examples. And that is because Latin at the time allegedly did not have a letter(B) to represent the sound v even though B is reported to sound as [v] in Latin before the 1st CE.

What is certain however is that the Classical Latin letter V was used for the vowel Y(ypsilon) or for the consonant W(γoui), BUT NOT for V, so that precludes it until it changed from w to v, and evidently their Latin B from [β] to [b] at which point all epigraphies going forward render Greek B to Latin V.

Evidence:

In Latin, a stemless variant shape of the upsilon was borrowed in early times as U, taking the form of modern-day V – either directly from the Western Greek alphabet or from the Etruscan alphabet as an intermediary – to represent the same /u/ sound, as well as the consonantal /w/, num – originally spelled NVM – was pronounced /num/ and via was pronounced [ˈwia].[clarification needed] From the 1st century AD on, depending on Vulgar Latin dialect, consonantal /w/ developed into /β/ (kept in Spanish), then later to /v/.

Greek words containing the letter beta were transliterated to Latin using the letter b (Boeotia, Euboea, basis), although the fricative sound [v] existed in Latin (as consonantal u), and should have been chosen if beta had a fricative pronunciation.

Exactly, it was not just Cicero that did this, as above. Here, however, the author is now outright lying about the sound v allegedly existing in Classical Latin as consonantal u, he refers to the 'wi'(not vi) sound wiki informs us above(via = wia). He just bets on the reader's ignorance. In actual fact, when the Latin letter V eventually did become a consonantal vi instead of a w, then all Latin transliterations going forward use Latin V for Greek B.

For example, Adam and Eve/Eβe.

So, Latins used Latin B for Greek B when their B was a /v and then they used V for B when their V became a /v from /wi and their B from /v became a /b. They also used Latin letter C for Greek K(kinetic, cinema, kinema) when C was K but now it's a ci(si), so people get confused.

Letters pi, beta, and phi, were called labial consonants by ancient Greek grammarians (and are still learned under this label in Greek elementary schools). Of these three, however, only pi is a true labial sound in Modern Greek, while beta and phi are labiodental*. The term labial is accurate if beta was pronounced as [b], and phi as [ph] (aspirated [p]).

Greeks do not distinguish between so-called "pure" labials and labiodentals, both ancients and moderns call them both the 'lip consonants' whence the author's equivalency with "labial". The 'lip consonants'(aka labial) is therefore totally accurate both for pure labials(lips only, mb, p) and labiodentals(lips with teeth secondarily) both in modern, medieval, and ancient Greek.

One should also note that [modern, ancient, medieval] Greeks use the Εnglish sound b and they represent it by the diphthong 'MP'( .ie mpampas=babas=daddy), they also use the English sound D(dental) which they represent with the diphtong 'NT', antras=andras=man.

Greek grammarians (e.g., Dionysius Thrax) divide consonants into two primary categories: the aphona (beta, gamma, delta, kappa, pi, tau, theta, phi, and chi), and the hemiphona (zeta, ksi, psi, lambda, mu, nu, rho, sigma). In Aristotle's Poetics (1456b) the aphona (of which beta is a member) are described as "having contact" (= "meta prosboles"), but not being pronounceable without a vowel. In modern parlance we would say that aphona are the plosives, pronounced instantaneously, while hemiphona are fricatives, and those other consonants that can be pronounced continuously, without the need for a following vowel. If beta were fricative, it would be classified as one of the hemiphona.

This is my favorite for several reasons. Notice he quotes Aristotle 1456b, mark this for later as it will combine with an earlier argument.

He says that both Dionysius and Aristotle claim that hemiphona = modern fricatives. V = fricative, V not listed with hemiphona(fricatives), so β cannot be V because V cannot be fricative, it has to be something else(.ie an English plosive B).

Let's assume for a moment that they do say this thing just to humor these people. The other hemiphona(.ie supposedly fricatives) that Dionysius Thrax, Aristotle and all other grammarians list are l,m,n,r as per the author himself. Are these fricatives?

Head explosion.

No, these cannot be the arguments that the entire western world uses to greeklish the Greek language, except for Greece & Jewish studies.

Yes friends, they actually are.

Let us proceed and take the rest of the text apart.

The author claims that the 9 aphona(Κ,Τ,Π, Β,Δ,Γ, Φ,Θ,Χ) must all be "plosives" he theorizes, no fricatives are allowed even though both plosives and fricatives are the same family of obstruents. Second, notice how the author starts with a statement from Dionysius Thrax(ancient Greek grammarian who analyses the letters perfectly down to the t as we shall see below) and finishes with a statement from Aristotle, a philosopher & not grammarian who admits so himself in the text they are quoting("περὶ ὧν καθ᾽ ἕκαστον ἐν τοῖς μετρικοῖς προσήκει θεωρεῖν=But the detailed study of these matters properly concerns students of metre".) and who totally contradicts what Allen claims that he says. It should be noted that this particular passage of Aristotle is not only misinterpreted very poorly but also mistranslated [by Fyfe] and quite maliciously so.

Aristotle makes a passing comment about aphona, hemiphones and vowels as well as Γ, Ρ, Σ but not B which is the actual letter he discusses, in a work about Poetry and not about the sounds of consonants as the author implies.

First, I will demonstrate, the way that [modern, medieval, and ancient] Greek people learn the alphabet, in accordance with Dionysius Thrax, and Dionysius Halicarnaseus who makes the exact same statements but goes into even more depth analysing how to produce each and every letter properly and accurately.

Of the so-called “voiceless letters,’ which are nine in number, three are smooth, three rough, and three intermediate between these. The smooth are «,π, τ, κ the rough φ, θ, χ; the intermediate, β, δ, γ. They are pronounced as follows: three of them (π, β, φ) from the edge of the lips, when the mouth is compressed and the breath, being driven forward from the windpipe, breaks through the obstruction. Among these π is smooth, φ rough, and β comes between the two, being smoother than the latter and rougher than the former. This is one set of three mutes, all three spoken with a like configuration of our organs, but differing in smoothness and roughness. The next three(τ,δ,θ) are pronounced by the tongue being pressed hard against the extremity of the mouth near the upper teeth, then being blown back by the breath, and affording it an outlet downwards round the teeth. These differ in roughness and smoothness, τ being the smoothest of them, θ the roughest, and δ in between them. This is the second set of three aphona. The three remaining aphona are spoken with the tongue rising to the palate near the throat, and the windpipe echoing to the breath. These, again, differ in no way from one another as regards formation; but κ is pronounced smoothly, χ roughly, γ in between the two. Of these the best are the rough χ which are uttered with a lot of breath(pollo to pneumati); next those which are in between(en to meso); worst those with no breath(tin auton dynamin echein monin); since they have their own force alone, while the rough letters have the windpipe breath also applied so that they are somewhere nearer perfection than the others.

Greeks define consonants and vowels as such: vowels = voice. Every vowel(phoni-en) makes a voice(phone). En phone=in voice=vowel. AAA, EEE, III, OOOO.

Hemiphones are letters such as S, L, M, N, R, letters that when attempted to sound on their own have no vowel(.ie voice) but a little vowelization escapes as in "hissing & mumbling" as both Thrax and Halicarnaseus inform us, so due to this little escape of a little /i or /ou, they are thus called semi-voices, ie letters that even without a vowel create a little vowel sound when attempted without one but not good enough to be a proper voice.

So consonants are broken down to aphona(no vowelisation/no voice without a vowel or hemiphone next to it) and hemiphona(slight vowelisation, as in 'hissing and mumbling' word for word from Thrax & Halicarnaseus).

The aphona (π,β,φ; τ,δ,θ; κ,γ,χ) equivalently in English = /p,/v,/f; /t, /δ this, /θ theos; κ=k, γ as in yota, χ = ch as in Bach

Are further broken down to labials(lips), dentals(teeth), velars(back of palate)

Labials: π,β,φ = p,v,f
Dentals: τ,δ,θ = t as in tea, δ as in this, θ as in theos
Velars: κ,γ,χ = k, γ as in yota(not exactly but close enough, no 100% english sound exists for this, one needs to remove the implied i between y and o from yo for a cleaner go that is not yo but γο), χ = ch as in Bach

And they are categorised further in a 3x3 matrix :

The horizontal axis defines smoothness, intermediacy and ψoarseness, while the vertical defines the labials, dentals and velars, both axes start from p the purest, cleanest, sharpest labial.

π, τ, κ = sharp
β, δ, γ = intermediates
φ, θ(theos), χ = hoarse.

How are fricatives distinguished from plosives as they are both obstruents?

plosives (oral stops), such as [p, t, k, b, d, ɡ], with complete occlusion of the vocal tract, often followed by a release burst;
fricatives, such as [f, φ, θ, s, ʃ, x, v, β, z, ʒ, ɣ], with limited closure, not stopping airflow but making it turbulent;[/u];

What is Halicarnaseus telling us about the dasea(coarse letters φ=f, θ, χ )? That the windpipe modulates the turbulence of the air.

What does he tell us about the fricatives β,δ,γ? that they also require modulation of the windpipe air(arterias ypichousin to pneumati) but less(intermediate) than the coarse ones which are the "best" and the most "perfect" of all.

What does he tell us about the plosives κ, τ, π that they have NO air but their own force alone(dynamin echei monin).

As such we have only 3 plosives, and 6 fricatives. And not 9 "plosives" as Allen is trying to shove down our throats in a very poor manner with tiny nitpicks & eye-popping misquotes.

I cannot stress enough the pains that both Thrax and Halicarnaseus went to underline that the intermediates(mesa) are defined soundwise as in between the sharp(psila) and coarse(dasea). They therefore place, β,δ,γ as intermediate sounds between the rest.

V is in between p and f in our mouths based on the air we use, p=no air, v=air, f=full air. English B is nowhere in between p and f. In fact, b is an airless plosive and it exists in this order, b, p, v, f in our mouth, not p, b, f = error! B is not intermediate between p and f, but v is intermediate.

Th(Δ) as in that is in between t for tea and /θ as in th for theos depending on the air modulation in our mouths. English D(nt) is nowhere in between t and th, again it exists in this order d, t, th/δ ,th /θ
Γ(gh) is also in between k and ch, English g=gk is not in between k καππα, χι(Bach), once again English g exists in this order g, k, gh /γ, ch /χ in our mouths.

So now, I ended up dragging more letters along the ride, and sure, why not?

It takes quite a bit of malice, creative interpretation, and dodgy translation to miss this and proclaim that the Greeks had no fricatives in their phonetic inventory until one fine day they had 6/9 of them or that the Latins had no /v sound at all. Even though 3 letters in 2 different cultures were used for V. Latin B for /v, Greek B for /v, and Latin v for /v later. In the subsequent posts, we will examine epigraphies as well as more evidence to close this matter permanently.

Anyhow, I promised a twist on an earlier argument about the joke as to how the sheep sound, note that the author misrepresents a text about 'a fool being unable to vocalize sheep with proper letters'. The same author uses Aristotle 1456b to make another fake argument but what does Aristotle tell us about sheep in Poetics 1456b?

Read please:

Animals utter indivisible sounds but none that I should call a letter.

Aristotle is telling us that using a letter to accurately represent animal sounds is an exercise in vain, something we now recognize as different people even within the same language family vocalize the same animals very very differently. And after all, in modern Greek bleating is velazo(βελαζω), not belazo, even if the sound for sheep is rendered as mpeeeee!

The contradiction of using Aristotle 1456b, when Aristotle contradicts even more the sheepish argument the same guy(Allen) made is quite outrageous but the author has departed the outrageous long ago, so this looks like a drop in the ocean by comparison. Still, animal sounds tell us little in reality but it does show that we are dealing with people on a mission with specific intent because in reality, you don't need Aristotle to tell you this, you'd expect academics to understand as much anyway.

[noemon]

My conversation with Luke Ranieri, the "inventor" of Lucian on his youtube channel:

I ask this question:

I'm surprised you did not you mention the definition of Dionysius of Thrax who calls β,δ,γ μέσα.

We have seen that, in describing the ἄφωνα, the Grammarians refer to β δ, γ with the term "μέσα", whence the latin "mediae". In the specific case of Halicarnasseus, the μέσα are defined with respect to the ψιλά and the δασέα as: "μεταξὺ τούτων", "κοινὰ δὲ ἀμφοῖν", "μέσον δὲ ἀμφοῖν τὸ β", "μέσον δὲ καὶ ἐπίκοινον τὸ δ", "τὸ δὲ γ μετρίως καὶ μεταξὺ ἀμφοῖν".

All these expressions suggest that, whatever the ψιλά (π, τ, κ) and the δασέα(hoarse) (φ, θ, χ) are, the μέσα (β, δ, γ) come between them.

The grammarians are saying that the median sound between p and ph is β. Is english b(mp) the middle point between p and ph? Of course not, but vi, β is the middle point between pi and phi in our mouths.

The same goes for δ and γ. They are not 'mesa' in Erasmian or in conservative Lucian.

Doesn't this present a real problem for you?

Luke replies:

The term μέσα does not imply they are fricatives (indeed, since the aspirates φ θ χ were not fricatives, but aspirated stops, the realizations /v ð ɣ/ would not be “intermediate” either). To wit, the Romans, who did not have fricatives for b d g, describe these letters and their Greek equivalents with the exact same term. Thus the term μέσα means specifically /b d g/.

The mediae/μέσα are not intermediate to the other stops, but to true sonorants, continuants or spirants like σ ξ λ ρ μ ν that are called ἡμίφωνα, meaning “semivowels.” Said in another way, φ θ χ π τ κ /pʰ tʰ kʰ p t k/, which were all voiceless stops (aspirated and unaspirated) were all perceived at one end, and semivowels like μ ν at the other end, and β δ γ /b d g/ were μέσα, middle, intermediate on that spectrum.

Retort:

Thrax defines the mesa(β,δ,γ) in respect to the psila(π,τ,κ) and dasea(φ,θ,χ) quite specifically and quite explicitly, they are mesa(intermediate) in respect with the psila and dasea, not in respect with the hemiphones and aphona(voiceless stops) as you interpret it this text.

And to alleviate any doubt, Thrax does so 'explicitly':

Link: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3AT ... ax.djvu/10

"Of these, three are smooth, κ, π, τ; three are rough, θ, φ, χ, and three are medial, β, γ, δ. The last are called medials because they are rougher than the smooths, and smoother than the roughs. And β is the medial between π and φ, γ between κ and χ, and δ between τ and θ. The roughs stand related to the smooths thus:

φ to π—ἀλλά μοι εἴφ’ ὅπῃ ἔσχες ἰὼν εὐεργέα νῆα·
χ to κ—αὐτίχ’ ὁ μὲν χλαῖνάν τε χιτῶνά τε ἕννυτ’ Ὀδυσσεύς·
θ to τ—ὣς ἔφαθ’, οἱ δ’ ἄρα πάντες ἀκὴν ἐγένοντο σιωπῇ."

Now English B as a plosive stop in Erasmian and Lucian, CANNOT be in between p and ph. It simply can't. Hence certain people's mental acrobatics on this as well as Allen's rather ridiculous confusion of equating hemiphones with fricatives. LMNR, fricatives? grouped with β,δ,γ? The pipe must have had some really good stuff in it.

You can't really miss that.


Anyway, 24 hours later he did not respond to this so I sent a new post:

Hello Luke,

My comments on your debate with Randall Buth from the links on your website:


1) His case in my opinion is more logical than yours, hence why he does not succumb to your requests for sharing "ancient Greek" as you asked him for you to get Attic and for him to get to keep Koine(but only around Judea, lol!). Of course, he never even bothered to reply. I am going to go out on a limb and say that these videos are a direct response to Buth, where you "agree" with him only on the thing you want to and dismiss him for the eras you consider yourself the expert. Since he did not give it to you himself, these attempts pencil your effort to take it on your own. Please correct me if I'm wrong. This is my impression.
2) He clearly corrects your chronology, .ie instead of 1st-5th CE(for Buth, Modern Greek, etcetera) as you claim he posits further back to 3rd-1st CE. Because as he says speech happens well before it solidifies in writing and I would add even more so when these changes are so subtle. These "were not happening" as you claimed, they 'had already happened' as Buth corrected.
3) My personal opinion is that Lucian variants of Attic make very little sense. If we are going to have variants, we ought to have actual real dialectical variants, and not reconstructed variants of the same dialect in different localities(reconstruction largely based on guesswork and linguistic bias), and hence why your 4 principles may make sense to you(and how you prioritized those principles), but not to Buth, me or others. Simply put, no, we should not have different variants for the same dialect and more than that educationally the Lucian variants are simply adding piles of dauntness to aspiring non-Greek students of Greek on top of pre-existing piles on the mountain top. Moreover, let's be frank, they are guesswork, and some of it quite bad as well, for example the breakup of all or most of the vowel diphthongs creates a whole bunch of added syllables for Erasmians/Lucians and they sound like the Minions from Despicable Me, constantly making the sound oi, va vo-i, hey, a-i. Even worse, at this point you are all well aware that the diphthongs are and were used dually. Oi was i and o-i, ei was i and e-i, ai was e and a-i. While ei and ai have been accepted to tilt more towards the Greek than Erasmian at least in their majority, you still insist on oi, even though Allen says that oi was o-i only when a consonant had dropped between them. Take homoioi for example, it is very doubtful that a consonant ever existed here between the oi's and as such it is far more plausible to be 3-syllabic( ho-moi-oi as in Greek proper) than 5-syllabic as in Erasmian/Lucian(ho-mo-i-o-i, here come the Minions again). So if we cannot discover ALL those words that dropped the consonant between o and i, then we have to accept a compromise, and the compromise of course goes to Greek proper as it did with ei and ai. Living languages always take priority over 'guessed reconstruction' as well as for all the other reasons that I develop.
4) Do Erasmians ever use Buth, Kantor, or Teodorsson to read Koine, of course not, they never did and they still don't. They use the version of Erasmian that they learned depending on teacher and location. They then project Erasmian onto the Koine. Worse than that, no Erasmian ever teaches the same Erasmian, and the same applies to Lucian(because both Lucian and Erasmian are frankenstein(not even 'dead' as that would imply they actually lived once, they are rather literal Frankensteins made up of pieces just sawn together largely based on guesswork, combined in your case with a Rome-Centric/Latin-centric interpretation of Greek) languages, nobody uses and someone just came up with, so by that you create and propagate a Babel tower and for no discernible reasons as the main hung-ups are totally "adiafora".
5) Non-Greek students report that after learning "Erasmian", "traditional" "Lucian" or whatever, they had serious trouble retaining their lingual education, while those that learned Buth, Kantor, modern Greek had no trouble at all with retention as a living language is retained much easier. The same people also report a heightened ability to spot the roots of the words and to a heightened ability with exegesis. Link: https://gervatoshav.blogspot.com/2008/0 ... ation.html

Lastly, there is a lot of focus by yourself, Luke on things that are objectively speaking totally "adiafora"(inconsequential) as Buth also commented on your "retorts". I also notice a heightened animosity towards Greek people in your videos, in one of them you put "modern Greek" at the end purely for "Greek nationalists". That was quite rude. In addition, you keep referring to modern Greek as miles away from Buth, Kantor, Teodorsson, when in fact it is within the range of modern Greek and you said as much in your debate with Buth, but in your videos, you treat it as if it is miles away from Buth, when in fact conservative Lucian is what is miles away from Buth and Buth is just regular modern Greek proper. So you portray that which is close as far in your videos and that which is far as closer(your own reconstructed system) so as to grant yourself more legitimacy/prestige by being "closer" to Buth and Greek proper as less legitimacy due to it being "further", when in reality the exact opposite is true. This is naughty but I may be over-reacting to certain statements of yours.

PS: Allen is ridiculously wrong on Dionysius of Thrax and one can only assume that he is pro-actively mis-representing him consciously. I expected that you would provide something alternative but was disappointed. One cannot claim that the mesa distinction applies to the hemiphones and another category of consonants, when in fact it explicitly applies to psila, mesa and dasea consonants and not to hemiphones. Frankly, nobody cares, where, how and why the Romans describe their consonants as "mesa" as you claim. This is not how the Romans describe their letters in case you forgot, this is how the Greeks define the sounds of their own letters. I would appreciate evidence for your claim about Romans and mesa/mids, however, not that it adds any actual weight to your argument on Thrax.

[noemon]

A major misconception of the Erasmians(including Luke Ranieri) is in regards to the description of the consonants as psila(cognate with light coffee and not without coffee), mesa ./ie inter-mediates in respect to the other two, dasea(cognate with dense and not with aspirate) & pneuma(air) by both Dionysius Thrax and Dionysius Halicarnaseus.

They claim:

In simple terms, they treat these items as binary, psilo=no dasy=yes, pneuma = h as in help. What do you do with the category 'mesa'(intermediates)? In their case, mostly they just ignore it as irrelevant, as a problem they cannot explain, so try to obscure this with strawmen & jargon or outright hallucination as the one we saw Luke exhibited in the previous post. Some of them write the mesa as such +1/2 h(aspirate).

Just like with diatonic music, westerners struggle with chroma(colour).

When the ancient grammarians tell us that dasy pneuma is that which has pollo pneuma(plenty of air in your mouth). Plosive stops(p,t,k) do not have air and certainly not plenty of it. All 9 being airless plosive stops(psila) makes no rational sense since the other three media are described by both grammarians as requiring more air and the dasea even more [air].

Let us consider the proposition on Luke Ranieri's youtube video above as a hypothesis so that we can examine what he actually means there in the video.

He claims that:

1) Out of all 9 consonants(π,β,φ, κ,γ,χ, τ,δ,θ) of Greek, ALL 9 of them were just stops in Attic(strictly during the 5th BCE alone) and Attic alone. In even more simple terms, he & Allen claims that all ancient Greek people(and all ancient Romans) could not vocalise the sound Vi.
Apparently, all 20-30 million of them were lisped. Who cares if vocal and fone literally means voice in both languages, no they say, when Greeks wrote φωνη, they spoke pone instead, pocalisation for ancient Greeks and Romans and no vagine of course, the [Greeks] discovered how to vocalise vagine Alexander crossed into Asia and the Romans by Jesus. Good thing those Christians taught those haughty Romans how to vocalise their Vis. Otherwise today we may have missed V for Vendetta.
2) Attic [+ Classical Latin] had no non-sibilant fricatives, just stops! You know cause it's cold in the Med and they spoke with their mouths closed using only plosive pi's. Consider that the only other languages in the planet with no non-sibilant fricatives(.ie Vi's) are some opaque tribes in Australia.
3) If we assume ΧΘΩΝ ΦΘΟΝΟΣ as plosives = KHTHON PHTHONOS, the sequence of these plosive values DO NOT exist in any language, anywhere in the planet and no Greek person of any variety, locality or historical period is capable of pronouncing these words, in terms of pronunciation nor can any Greek person of any time, place or space, pronounce DHIPHTHOGGOS(diphtong) if we use his system for ALL 9 being purely plosive stops {M}Pis, {N}Tetas and {N}Kappas. More importantly, he admits in the video himself that almost no European can actually distinguish these sounds.

We know that:
1) [modern] Greek has 6 non-sibilant fricatives(β,φ, γ,χ, δ,θ).
2) He concedes that the [modern] Greek fricatives magically appear sometime post 4th BCE.
3) the ONLY evidence for Attic are the arguments on the previous post + the quantum leaps Erasmians make to misrepresent those 2 ancient grammarians; Thrax who curiously lived in the 2nd BCE and Halicarnaseus who lived in the 1st BCE, combined with an absolute and total convinction that Latin=>Greek. But not Greek =>Latin. Even if the adoption of letters was from Greek to Latin.
4) That means that according to him neither of the 2 Greek grammarians are aware of Greek fricatives in the 2nd-1st CE, while he concedes that fricatisation is apparent post-4th BCE and furnishes numerous evidence for them by himself in the video.

The chronological/historical contradiction of the claim is demonstrated loud and clear putting paid on the argument that no fricatives existed during the time of Thrax and Halicarnaseus for them to NOT even include them.

But is that all?

Certainly not, now let us examine the linguistic claims:

Claims

1) that fricatives just literally appear with parthenogenesis, sometime after the 4th BCE and for the next 2400 years until the present.

2) that fricatives(v, f, th) proven in Laconian and Boeotian DO NOT demonstrate parallel existence or development but outright adoption of Boeotian and Laconian by the Athenians, Macedonians & Ionians during a time when linguistically/politically/demographically Athenians/Macedonians/Ionians were giants while Boetians and Laconians mere ants. According to Allen, et al the giants adopted the conventions of the ants because the idea that all of them may have had fricatives is a perverse & total impossibility in the [Erasmian/Allenian]narrative, that can never be considered.

We know:

1) that plosives and fricatives are the same family(obstruents) and that in Greek they are also homophonous and interchangeable depending on the surrounding letters.

2) We also know that the only difference between plosives and fricatives is the level of obstruancy or stricture of the air(pneuma).

3) The ancient Grammarians place the 9 consonants into 2(two) 3(three) level matrixes. Labials, dentals, velars & psila, mesa, dasea. Erasmians list them all as the same category(plosives) so no more 3x3(as per grammarians) but 1X9(as per Indo-German reconstructionists of the 19-20th centuries).

4) that Halicarnaseus says that psilo, meso and dasy is in relation to the quantity(pollo) of pneuma(air both to & from the lungs) in relation to one another.

We also know that Halicarnaseus calls kratista(greatest/best) the densest(dasea), then the mediates(mesa) and the worst are the light(psila).
'Psila filaraki' is how modern-day Greek junkies beg for psila(coins) on the street as opposed to hondra(fat) cash.

We also know that dasys is cognate with dasos/dense [air/pneuma] and psilos with light as in light armor(psiloi).

The descriptions and terminology of the Grammarians make it sufficiently clear that the three-way distinction of each class of mutes (labials, dentals, velars) as ψιλά, μέσα and δασέα involved the gradual increase of "πνεῦμα", a term already demonstrated to refer to the airstream. This cannot be accommodated in the dubious catholic/erasmian model that essentially follows the Armenian paradigm (characterised by the Voice-Onset Time feature that suggests a different ordering: voiced, tenuis, aspirated or μέσα, ψιλά, δασέα, or intermediates, light, dense); instead, the teaching of the Grammarians matches nearly perfectly the triangular model of modern Spanish, which is based on stricture. At the same time, there is evidence of a preferred fricative pronunciation of the mediae, notably the use of <Γ> for representing [ŋ], the omission or wrong insertion of γ and the interchange of Δ and Ζ. As for the meagre arguments used in favour of the plosive pronunciation of the mediae, these are based on dogma, acute misrepresentation, and hallucination.

------------------

Here are some non-exhaustive exercises:

GAPING chasm(χασμα), & GAPING chaos(χαος), make more sense with GAPING HA than they do with restricted KA, as does φyssao(to blow air), instead of pyssao where the blowing of the air is not possible when pronouncing this word with a plosive while with fricative fyssao(maximum blow air is released from the mouth) thus confirming their actual agreement in usage.

The fact that Greek non-sibilant fricatives correspond to Hebrew fricatives in the Septuagint and to Persian fricatives, this correspondence is usually dismissed under a type of implicit orientalist argument though few would actually voice that today, the inherent presumption remains with the same kind of conviction that Latin define ancient Greek consonants even if Latin was the one doing the adoption. Their claim is the equivalent conviction shared by modern-day nationalists who claim that the Greek alphabet defines the sounds of its progenitor west-Phoinician. Though in this case we are dealing with western European jingoists instead.

Orientalism/antisemitism .ie Greek fricative consonants cannot agree more with Egyptians, Jews, and Iranians than French, Anglos, and Germans even if Alexander went East instead of West, so if Jews, Egyptians, Iranians have more fricatives than plosives and Germans more plosives than fricatives then the Attic Greeks(European "ubermenschen", not to be confused with modern untermenschen) had no fricatives at all and only plosives, even though Germans, Italians, and Anglos have fricatives than just the sibilants. The reasoning is that in harshly mute Anglo-Germanic languages, fricatives sound ugly and Attic Greek(the lingo of the euro-ubermenschen) cannot be "ugly" from the Anglo-German lens. It has to obey Anglo-German sound aesthetics instead of Semitic, Egyptian, and Iranian, that would be a step too far. Westerners cringe when they hear chromatic music, just like they cringe when they hear too many ha's & ya's. The Spaniards cringe when they hear Anglo-Germans speaking Spanish and we cringe when we listen to Erasmians.

Apparently, only the Attic Greeks could not produce friction in their mouths until the 4th BCE, then suddenly they could for 6 of them. The rest of Greece had them but that does not show that it was a widespread phenomenon, god forbid, then this video would probably not even exist.

[noemon]

When you start from a point of reference that is imaginative, what you get is teratogenesis because you project recursive rules in a language where the exception is the rule, so your rule is 100% incorrect, regardless of marginal accuracy in range and this opens up like a butterfly as you proceed to build upon speculation & bias recursively. The proper way of science is to work backward from those things you know 100%(in this case the Koine) and work your way back. Erasmians reconstructed PIE(Proto-Indo-German, later European) first and then worked their way forward from PIE to meet the Koine Greek but the problem is that they do not meet the Koine, rather the 6 fricatives in the Koine & modern appear by immaculate conception(parthenogenesis).

This is just bad science, especially when one pro-actively misleads on the content of the ancient grammarians who have been both the official and unofficial grammar books of all consecutive Greek states & people since they were written.

The whole issue for them psychologically lies on the B, they suppose that B=B(Greek to Latin and vice-versa) in all ancient epigraphies before the Common Era(later it becomes B=V in epigraphies from Greek to Latin as Classical Latin v = [w](via=wia) becomes [v] and Vulgate Latin B goes to [b] while V fixes itself as [v] =[β]).

So they, as in Friedrich W. Blass in p. 108: write: "Latin b g d and Greek β γ δ correspond to one another with perfect regularity" assuming that since the "most important" Europeans except for the Spanish and Greeks pronounce their Bis as MPetas everything has to match perfectly [for Germans] because that way he gets to use these phonemes in older Germanic(in perfect harmony with modern) and in PIE and so that means that something(or someone) has to give. Which forces Anglo-Germans particularly from Cambridge into the default position that the Attic Greeks & Archaic-Classical Latins must have done so too. This lies at the very heart of the matter. German exceptionalism of matching the sounds of Greek and Latin as they are in modern German of the present day. This is precisely the same thing as when Greek nationalists project their alphabet to the progenitor Phoenician one and claim that Greek sounds came first. Here the Germans project to Latin and from Latin they project to Greek. Of course, the idea that Latin B may be a V same as the Greek, Phoenician & Spanish one cannot be uttered, considered or even speculated on. One would think that Blass would furnish some evidence that Latin B was always [b] as in beer. But he doesn't, no one does actually. It's just apriori assertions turned to speculation * bias^3. Yet we know for a fact that in Latin, v was predominantly [w] before the 1st CE and gradually [v] afterward;

So if:

1) the values of β and b were identical or sufficiently close
2) b and v interchange from 1st CE
3) β for v is common from 1st CE

Then,

β and b coincided at [v] (or [β]) before the 1st CE and v met them there (on its way from [w]) afterward,

This has already been proposed a couple of centuries ago by Pickering, who was ahead of his time p. 253: "very strong evidence, that the Romans did for a long period pronounce their B so nearly like a V, as in general not to be distinguishable from it, at least by the ears of foreigners, just as is the case with the Spaniards at the present day".

Thus, Latin V[β] took the place of B[β] as B[β] moved to [b] later.

How about West-Semitic the progenitor of the Ionic alphavet? How is Bet(VET) pronounced in all West Semitic?

The B problem drags the issue to other letters such as φ,θ,χ. Because if these were fricatives as they have been for 2000 years+(for certain), then necessarily they drag the b(which is defined as intermediate) into fricative territory v too, due to Thrax's and Halicarnaseus's psila(π,τ,κ), mesa(β,δ,γ) dasea(φ,θ,χ) of the ancient grammarians whom the Erasmians dread so much, which once again I remind you that even under their present theory, they still cannot agree with these very simple rules of grammar or pneuma(air).

It would be suitable to discuss the process of establishing the proto-Greek alphabet. The Greeks took the Phoenician's west-semitic consonant only syllabary, they matched all the consonants they could match as precisely as they could match their own vocalizations & in order of appearance(which they also used as numbers) and since West-Semitic had a lot more consonant sounds than Greek, they used the leftovers to establish the vowels and thus create the first 'full' alphabet.

With thanks to Kanlis http://attic.kanlis.com/sources.html

[MistyTiger]

Interesting.

I learned Latin in my early teens. I was pronouncing v as w. Funny enough, the textbook was from Cambridge University.

It would have been interesting if I had learned Greek along with the Latin curriculum.

[noemon]

Aristotle Poetics 1456b from LSJ: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/te ... on%3D1456b

Surreal stuff coming up:

Sidney Allen uses this excerpt from Aristotle to "prove" that all 9 allegedly "plosive" consonants are 'not-sounding' so the reader associates them with 'plosives' by proxy and that allegedly the only difference between consonants is the binary "with or without aspiration".


Original:

φωνῆεν μὲν <τὸ> ἄνευ προσβολῆς ἔχον φωνὴν ἀκουστήν, ἡμίφωνον δὲ τὸ μετὰ προσβολῆς ἔχον φωνὴν ἀκουστήν, οἷον τὸ Σ καὶ τὸ Ρ, ἄφωνον δὲ τὸ μετὰ προσβολῆς καθ᾽ αὑτὸ μὲν οὐδεμίαν ἔχον φωνήν, μετὰ δὲ τῶν ἐχόντων τινὰ φωνὴν γινόμενον ἀκουστόν, οἷον τὸ Γ καὶ τὸ Δ. ταῦτα δὲ διαφέρει σχήμασίν τε τοῦ στόματος καὶ τόποις καὶ δασύτητι καὶ ψιλότητι καὶ μήκει καὶ βραχύτητι ἔτι δὲ ὀξύτητι καὶ βαρύτητι καὶ τῷ μέσῳ: περὶ ὧν καθ᾽ ἕκαστον ἐν τοῖς μετρικοῖς προσήκει θεωρεῖν.

My translation:

Highlighted the word Voice=phone=vowel without any change/alteration in word between the 2 terms to distinguish vowel from voice. In other words, voice means only when a vowel sound is made, not when a sound, because hissing(s), mumbling(lmnr) and zizzing(z) are also sounds but these are specifically distinguished from the 9 consonants on the point of VOICE(vowel, not sound) and termed semi-voices(hemiphona) instead because some sort of vowel like i, or echo ou appears when voiced in their own(.ie with no vowel) as in hissing for example and mumbling.

An in-voice(phone-en=vowel) is that which with no application, has voice audible(acoustin), a half-voice(hemi-phone) is that which requires further application [.ie of another letter] to make voice audible like Σ S and Ρ R. The voiceless [consonants =con+sona] are those that which have no voice of their own but become voiced only when combined with those that have voice(.ie vowels). Examples of the voice-less ones are Γamma(Gamma), Δelta(Delta).

These voiceless letters differ according to the shape and the place of the mouth and denser and lighter and longer and shorter but also in sharpness, heavyness & intermediacy. But the detailed study of these matters concerns students of metre.

Cambridge translation (parenthesis mine):

A vowel is that which without any addition(application) has an audible sound(voice); a semivowel needs the addition(application) [of another letter] to give it audible sound(voice), for instance, S and R; a mute(non-vowel) is that which with addition(application) has no sound(vowel) of its own but becomes audible(vowelised) when combined with some of the letters which have a sound(vowel/voice). Examples of mutes(non-vowels) are G and D. These [non-vowel] Letters differ according to the shape of the mouth and the place at which they are sounded(voiced); in being with or without aspiration; in being long and short; and lastly in having an acute, grave, or intermediate accent. But the detailed study of these matters properly concerns students of metre.

First of all note how this author, uses sound instead of voice to translate voice. Say innocent error, synonym, may be used. Fine. Probolh, addition, application. Okay, synonymous perhaps. Fine again. Link: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/mo ... lh#lexicon

Now, the real mackoy, is in bold he not only mistranslates but totally invents a new sentence and several words to boot, that are NOWHERE to be found in the text, he is translating the bold kai dasytyti kai psilotyti which is and denser and lighter as that "in being with or without aspiration". He is also adding new words "in being, in being and in having an accent" when in reality Aristotle writes:

καὶ δασύτητι καὶ ψιλότητι καὶ μήκει καὶ βραχύτητι ἔτι δὲ ὀξύτητι καὶ βαρύτητι καὶ τῷ μέσῳ

and denser and lighter and longer and shorter but also in sharpness, heavyness & intermediacy

Our Cambridge-based Erasmian translator published in Perseus Library writes instead:

in being with or without aspiration, in being long and short; and lastly in having an acute, grave, or intermediate accent

"Accent" on consonants of ancient Greek?

This is the abracadabra of the yes/no binary that Erasmians add to the Greek consonants(and evidently to greek texts) to build their 9 plosive stops. The translator literally inserts his own new sentences and words into the text and if that were not enough, he mistranslates the entire paragraph and claims in yellow that the consonants literally differ in our mouth according to their accent. He means the with or without aspirate accent that he inserted in the text unilaterally earlier. Any basic student of ancient Greek can tell you that ancient Greek accents apply only to vowels and NOT to consonants! More importantly, Aristotle is not even aware of accents as they had NOT EVEN BEEN INVENTED YET. They were invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium well after Aristotle was dead, a whole century in fact! Why is Aristotle's text with accents then? Obviously, because medieval & modern Greek scribes added the accents as they parsed text from one medium to another over the centuries, ie VHS -> CD-> DVD, etcetera!

More to the point, Aristotle does not EVEN mention the word for accent(tonos), in his text, AT ALL, how could he when they do not even exist yet, nor does he mention the term with or without aspiration, he says word for word that the 9 consonants are formed according to the shape and the place of the mouth at which they become denser or lighter, longer or shorter but also in their sharpness & heaviness & intermediacy, which is of course what all other Greek grammarians are saying in their 3X3 matrixes.

This cannot be explained as "synonym", let's ignore this. Nor can this be explained as an honest mistake, this proves that we are dealing with people on a mission.

Anyway, to lighten the mood consider fone=voice. fonazo=to shout in modern, to vocalise in ancient. First of all, these are cognates and second, all these are fricatives!

[Saeko]

You watch Luke Ranieri, too? We must be the exact same kind of nerd.

[noemon]

Luke Ranieri keeps deleting this comment:



We could have been friends, but Luke is a missionary.

It's quite astonishing actually because he has the knowledge to read these texts himself and revise his position as the texts are very explicit(even those mistranslated ones are explicit to him as he can allegedly at least read from the original) but he is clearly preaching Allen. It should be noted that Luke's video is verbatim from Allen's Vox Graeca pages 18-20. Not a single original point is made. It's a pure copy/paste from text to video.

[noemon]

The oldest fully complete song & lyrics we got:

Seikilos Euterpe

Lyrics:

oson zeis, fainou
While you live, shine
miden olos sy lypou
zero grief to be had
pros oligon esti to zen
life is short
to telon o chronos apaitei
and Time demands his due.

Hakuna Matata or Don't worry by happy.

Before the intonated song, there is an inscription on the stone that reads:

"I am an Image, a Stone. Seikilos placed me here as a long-lasting sign of deathless remembrance"

Eikona=Image=Icon

A nice rendition with subs:

[noemon]

Latin exchange censors:

Greeks are not only "incapable of speaking Greek", they are also banned/silenced/censored from telling others what ancient & modern Hellenic grammarians/scholars instruct us.

This is the replacement theory we talked about manifest in the present day.

In the following days, I will be writing more about white supremacism and the origins of the aryan nazi theories, as well as the influence of these linguinistics
https://latin.stackexchange.com/a/23131/14622

My argument is that pronouncing ph as a fricative [f] as in 'photo' for example is perfectly valid & acceptable from a historical point of view & from a phonetic point of view & from a traditional point of view.

As Wikipedia informs us on its article ‘Pronunciation of Ancient Greek phonology in Teaching’, it is common practice both in Greece as well as in Italy, Germany, Britain & France regardless of whether one uses the Greek proper pronunciation or the reconstructed pronunciation promoted by Allen and the Erasmian tradition.

To examine what the phonetic value of ph used to be in Classical Latin, we examine what it used to transcribe which was Greek φ.

Greek Φ has the same phonetic value of fricative [f] since at the very least 88BCE as confirmed in epigraphy, when we start seeing Latin transliterations abandoning ph and using f to render Greek Φ instead.

The earliest Roman inscriptions of Greek Φ for F we have is from 88 BCE, which is more than one century older than Dafne.

As reported here:

"Trois inscriptions républicaines présentent un f en regard d’un φ" in English "Three republican inscriptions have a f for a φ"

The interesting question is if Greek Φ was fricative Latin F, then why did the Latins use ph to transcribe it before 88BCE?

This allows for only 2 possible scenarios within this context:

Either Greek φ was not [f], or Latin f was not [f] before 88 BCE.

Allen and his predecessors assert that Latin f was always fricative [f] “because it corresponds to modern-day Romance use” and that it was the Greek φ that changed from plosive ph to fricative [f]. Please note that since Allen does not use IPA, his value is more generally written as a plain f, which allows for more variation than IPA [f].

On its face, this is certainly not an acceptable proposal as modern-day values in Romance do not determine the Classical value of digamma F.

Quintilian points to the direction that Latin F was almost certainly not an [f] prior to the Classical times as he calls it "non humana voce". A non-human voice. Hardly the description one would give to such a presumably well-established phoneme.

Generally, both traditions(Greek proper & Erasmian) assert that in Greek the digamma F was ‘waw’ /w/ as it was in Phoenician before it got dropped in Attic pre-classical times. Latin adopted it from Greek alphabets that had maintained it, it is reasonable to presume that its phonetic value was closer to waw /w/ than [f].

As such it is more likely that Latin F was the one that did not sound like an [f] [prior to 88BCE] as it did not sound [f] in either Greek or in Phoenician from where it was adopted by the Latins. Therefore it is more likely that it was Latin F that met Greek fricative Φ, rather than the other way around after 88BCE.

At this point, we should look for more information from what the ancient grammarians tell us, particularly Dionysius Thrax and Dionysius Halicarnaseus, as well as the objectively-speaking mistranslated [by Fyfe] excerpt from Aristotle’s Poetics 1456b.

The phonetic value of B is also helpful in determining the value of Φ as ‘intermediate’ B is defined as sounding in between Π [p] and Φ [ph].

Under the current 'Armenian On-Set' model proposed by Allen, bilabial plosive [b] is not in between Π [p] and Φ [ph]. This is an acute contradiction of what all the ancient grammarians tell us, both about B and Φ.

Even the Greek proponent of “Erasmian” and a major supporter of Blass in Greece, Papadimitrakopoulos writes:

"The greatest deception of Blass regarding the examination of the teaching by Dionysius Halicarnasseus 
and the musician Aristides Quintilian on the δασέα is that wherever those use the word πνεῦμα he thinks that they mean 
«δασὺ πνεῦμα»[='spititus asper'], not having observed that they use the word πνεῦμα in connection with the pronunciation 
of every sound, therewith meaning the air that is pushed from the windpipe or the pharynx to the mouth, without which no 
speech sound is possible. Because of this, it is not strange that he misinterpreted the teaching of said writers of rhetoric and 
in the expression «τὰ δασέα ἐκφωνεῖται πολλῷ πνεύματι»[=the δασέα are pronounced with a lot of πνεῦμα] of Dionysius he 
saw the existence of 'spiritus asper', which is completely unknown to Dionysius in all his teaching about the pronunciation of the consonants and the vowels"

Blass, Allen & the entire tradition assumed that the dasea aphona relate to daseia accent(spiritus asper), which is a very clear error, daseia is the aspirate h used on vowels at the beginning of words or to the hemiphone rho but never on aphona consonants. Any elementary student of Ancient Greek knows that the accents(including daseia) apply only to vowels and not to consonants. Aristotle particularly, was not even aware of accents as Aristophanes of Byzantium invented them over a century later.

Dasy aphono on the other hand is cognate with dense and is grouped with psilo(cognate 'light') while intermediates(mesa) sit between the dasea & psila.

What to do with intermediates if one uses the binary daseia for dasy, despite knowing that previous statement?

According to Allen's 'Armenian' On-set theory, intermediates are first, then psila, and then dasea which quite evidently undermines his theory. As intermediates are supposed to be that, mesa, in between. But they're not intermediate if we follow Allen's plosive+ h as a superscript system.

Halicarnaseus analyses the process of building all the letters, including the aphona utilising the air from your airstream, the schema of your mouth & the position at which they are voiced. Describing the process of how a plosive becomes a fricative.

In the ‘ On Literary Composition translated by Roberts Rhys, pages 149-151’ Halicarnasseus uses 'pneuma' for every single letter, including M & N. This makes it evident & certain that pneuma does not refer to aspirate h as Blass, Allen & Sturtenvart assert.

He goes further and says that to vocalise K, Γ, Χ, the windpipe modulates(echoes) the sound, “arterias ypichousis to pneumati”.

In simple terms, the sounds change within our mouths from the air from our lungs and not outside our mouth due to a superscripted “aspirate” h in exhalation.

He then asserts that the Greek psila (.ie plosives) are the 'kakistan', the worst of all these letters due to the lack of a full breath [modulating the sound] as when obstruent plosives become fricatives.

"Obstruents are subdivided into:

plosives (oral stops), such as [p, t, k, b, d, ɡ], with complete occlusion of the vocal tract, often followed by a release burst;
fricatives, such as [f, s, ʃ, x, v, z, ʒ, ɣ], with limited closure, not stopping airflow but making it turbulent;"

While the fricatives ph(Φ), th(Θ), ch (Χ) are the ‘finest’ on account of utilizing pollo pneuma(plenty of air) to modulate these sounds at the place where they are voiced, pharynx, teeth, and lips.

This is consistent only for the present & historical Greek proper values of Φ,Θ,Χ as fricatives.

As an example try these exercises:

Gaping chasm(χασμα), & gaping chaos(χαος), make more sense with gaping HA than they do with restricted KA, as does φyssao(to blow air), instead of pyssao where the blowing of the air is only very marginal when pronouncing this word with a plosive while with fricative fyssao maximum blow air is released from the mouth thus confirming their actual agreement in usage.

Furthermore, according to Allen, neither ancient Greeks nor Romans were capable of vocalising the words 'voice' or any type of [v], instead they pocalised their poice(.ie voice/φωνη).

This is inconsistent with Cicero who relates Greek βινειν with Latin bini. He says that certain words sound similar but mean different things and he cites 'bini et vini' as examples.

Since we know for a fact that Latin 'vini'=ouini. The only phonetic value for 'bini' can be [v]ini in this context. A plosive [b] does not sound similar to ouini(vini) but [v] for bini does sound similar and many people confuse them still even to the present day.

So if:

the values of β and b were identical or sufficiently close
b and v interchange from 1st BCE
β for v is common from 1st BCE
Then,

β and b coincided at [v] (or [β]) before the 1st CE and v met them there (on its way from [w]) afterward,

This has already been proposed a couple of centuries ago by Pickering, who was ahead of his time p. 253:

"very strong evidence, that the Romans did for a long period pronounce their B so nearly like a V, as in general not 
to be distinguishable from it, at least by the ears of foreigners, just as is the case with the Spaniards at the present day".

A very interesting question that needs to be asked at this juncture is the following:

Allen accepts that the Classical Latins vocalized both [p] and [f], but not [v]. Is this possible for a human mouth to go from plosive [p] to fricative [f] and never find [v] that is intermediate inside our mouth as a vocalization? For the ancient Greeks his theory results to the conclusion, that none of them were capable of vocalising either [v] or [f], and then suddenly they all fricatised 6 of their 9 aphona consonants as if by immaculate conception. The reason for this is that the entire Erasmian tradition reconstructed PIE first, and then from an unattested reconstruction, they moved forward to reconstruct the very well-attested classical Greek and Latin. The problem with this method is fairly self-evident.

In any case, you will find here an in-depth counter-analysis of all of Allen’s and Sturtevant’s arguments for the dasea Φ, Θ, Χ where Kanlis builds upon Hatzidakis' work.

As a post-script I would like to finish by saying that before Allen, his predecessors had assumed that h can be pronounced separately, so if they saw a φi, χi or a θeta, they would break them in two and split them even between 2 syllables as in 'ink-horn'. The tradition therefore is not well-defined, it has been prone to rather large errors, mistransations and it is inconsistent with ancient grammarians, epigraphies & history.

EDIT PS: It is perfectly clear that this site is extremely hostile to the native Greek linguistic & grammar tradition. This site censors all the Greek academics that present the Greek academic tradition regarding Greek letters & phonemes. The censors here already deleted my original post, asked me to send a new one and now want to delete this one too. Just put a sign up: "Greeks not permitted" and be done with all the subterfuge.

[noemon]

Comments about the post:




Part of the comments break and continue at another chatroom:




It should be noted that he is wrong about Japanese also. As it contains [v], it is with [f] Japanese people struggle as any short google will tell you.

[noemon]

@Saeko

I am fairly confident this 'Philoglossos' is Luke Ranieri aka ScorpioMarcianus aka Lucian I am talking to in the comments section of his video but he uses another account, just in case he gets ridiculed, like he was with Thrax earlier. That did the rounds on Twitter. And a lot of confused people went to tell him, but he couldn't come up with a retort, apparently.

Also, Farya Faraji chimed in, whose posts I will deposit in the subsequent post.

I am getting into the habit of mirroring everything here, in Word and in screenshots because most of my arguments get deleted once the argument is lost. In twitter blocked, in the Latin Exchanged canceled and in Youtube hidden. PoFo exists many many years before these platforms and god willing it will exist for many more afterwards.

What on earth are you talking about? Spanish has f and p but does not have v. Japanese has f and p, but does not have v. Several dialects of Sardinian have f and p but not v. v is not in any way 'intermediate' between f and p, since f and p are both unvoiced sounds, and v is a voiced sound. But you are confused anyways, since Attic had neither f nor v. The problem here has nothing to do with Anglo-Germans, the problem is that you, with complete confidence, will state an utter falsehood without evidence because for whatever reason you think it's ideologically convenient for you, and that must mean it's true. You are arguing from a position of ignorance of mainstream linguistics, and so all you can do is come up with absurd straw men instead of engaging with what I'm saying.

Japanese has v but not f. Your strawman misunderstands, v can be dropped once discovered as it did in Chinese. That's not your claim, your claim is that it was not discovered [by Romans] while [f] was. This is not possible. Edit: And spanish has fricative [v] in its vocalic inventory with both B and V.

Japanese absolutely does not have V. I speak Japanese. Spanish also doesn't have V - intervocalic /b/ is a bilabial fricative [β], not a labiodental [v] like in Greek. But I could give you more examples - Māori has [f], [p] and no [v]. What do you mean by 'dropped once discovered?' Chinese doesn't have v, it's not 'dropped', it simply doesn't have the sound

@Philoglossos Your strawmen are quite funny, fricatives are still fricatives. Spanish has v fricative, and Japanese does and Sardinian does. Chinese also had fricative v at the same time it had fricative f and dropped it, Allens claim is that the Romans discovered fricative f but skipped fricative v not that they had it and dropped it but that they skipped it. This is not possible and your subterfuge strawing labio-dentals as the only fricative is quite laughable. Fricatives are obstruents like plosives are. A human mouth needs to obstruct air to get from a, b, c, d. Allen claims roman found d step but skipped c step of obstruancy. Once discovered they may be dropped due to sound change but not skip fricative v while discovering fricative f. That is flat-earthism gone insane. In case you are unaware sounds exist in a range and do NOT come out of logic pro as perfect units of sound. We are talking about humans not computers.

@euklidacragas 1) Please google 'straw man' because you clearly don't understand the meaning of the term.

2) Japanese categorically does not have the sound /v/. Japanese people can't pronounce /v/. It isn't in any Japanese words. I literally was just living there and speaking Japanese every day, why are you still lying about this? Name one Japanese word with the sound /v/ in it.

3) Of course it's not impossible, that is literally just something you made up. I already gave you both the example of Māori and of Japanese.

4) Chinese has never had the sound /v/, you simply made this up.

5) v is, as I mentioned before, not a 'step' between f and p. v is a voiced labiodental fricative. f is a voiceless labiodental fricative. p is a voiceless bilabial stop. The only difference between v and f is that v is voiced, so there is zero capacity in which it is intermediate between p and f.

6) You are starting from the completely faulty assumption that sounds must necessarily develop through specific intermediate stages in order to evolve into certain other sounds. Sound shift is often gradual, but gradual sound shifts can happen in a multitude of different ways, and in reality, p is closer to f than to v, not the other way around.

1) You actually claimed Sardinian and Spanish have no fricative V, yet you have the audacity to actually call me a"liar". Get a grip.
2) Strawman is when you attack something your interlocutor never said to make it appear as if you are actually performing a counter-act(hitting a straw-man), but it's pure impressionism that does not alters the actual argument. You claimed a distinction between bilabial and labio-dental fricatives. Straw-man, fricative is fricative as labial is labial and no kind of subterfuge changes that.
3) You still fail to comprehend the argument, either you don't get it, or you do but straw instead.

Rephrase: No human mouth can fricatise their obstruent pi's by occlusion to get to fricative fi's without first discovering intermediate vi's on the way there.
No such example exists, ANYWHERE, EVER!

They can drop them after discovery from pi to fi, but not fail to discover them and since you are talking about people(latins) that you accept as having a V phoneme, the argument becomes ridiculous because you can't justify the parthenogenesis of v.

Anyone can google, does Japanese ever had a fricative V? And find the answer on their own. They did and still do.

Reality: https://www2.hawaii.edu/~sford/research ... 20%2Fzj%2F.

"The Japanese voiceless palatal fricative /Ç/ is similar to the English phoneme /ß/" Is that a fricative v, you said they never had?

You are also making erroneous claims about Chinese, claiming openly they never had it either.

Again, reality is against you.

Go to this link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historica ... y#Initials

See the table LMC. See fricatives /f/, /v/, see how they appear TOGETHER in their inventory, but then V gets dropped as I informed you.

I'm not starting from any assumption, I am stating the obvious. Latins had a fricative v, both while letter v went from oui to [v] but also before! Latin had digamma waw/ w and and fricative f and v for w, but NOT V? Really, because you claim B for Anglo-German-Romance and it inconveniences you? Fricative v is intermediate between p and f as defined by all ancient Greek grammarians and the Latin ones, calling vita(intemediate) The value did not appear by immaculate conception when they met Jesus whenever convenient to Erasmians. It simply had a different alfavetical position, a very regular phenomenon, the same value and position it had when it was used to transcribe Basileus.

Cicero puts the nail on the coffin, he relates Greek βινειν with Latin bini. He says that certain words sound similar but mean different things(the former Greek means to copulate and the latter Latin means "paired group") and he cites 'bini et vini' as examples of things that sound similar but mean different things.

Since we know for a fact that Classical Latin vini=ouini. The only value for bini similar to ouini can be [v]ini. A plosive bilabial [b] does not sound similar to [oui] but fricative V does sound similar to oui and many people confuse them still even to the present day inclduing the East Asian people you like to cite so much in error.

Read more here before you make more: viewtopic.php?f=24&t=184137&p=15301916#p15301913

Then scroll up and read the entire thread.

1) "The Japanese voiceless palatal fricative /Ç/ is similar to the English phoneme /ß/" Is that a fricative v, you said they never had?

Of course not, and if you spent five seconds trying to figure out what those symbols represent and what the article actually says, you'd know this. The sound /Ç/ is the same as the sound of χι in Greek. For instance, this is the sound at the beginning of the Japanese word 'hito'. And in fact, this sound was ORIGINALLY a /p/ sound, which THEN developed into an /f/ sound, which THEN in turn developed into an /h/ sound, which is palatalized to /ç/. You are literally unintentionally trying to argue that χι is a /v/ sound. And if we keep reading from that same article:

Japanese lacks the English voiced labio-dental fricative /v/, the voiceless interdental fricative /q/ and its voiced counterpart /d/, and the voiced alveolar /zj/. According to Vance(1998), none of these phonemes appear in the Japanese language in native words, in borrowed words or as allophones of other phonemes

2) No, I said some dialects of Sardinian don't have fricative V (some do), and I said that Spanish has a phoneme /b/ which can allophonically become a bilabial fricative between vowels. Spanish doesn't have /v/ as distinct from /b/, which is why a Spanish person saying the name 'victor' will pronounce it as 'bictor'.

3) How is it a strawman to correctly point out that v is a labiodental fricative, which is the sound you have in Greek, and that Spanish doesn't have this sound? What did I attack that you didn't say?

4)

No human mouth can fricatise the obstruent pi's by occlusion to get to fricative fi's without first discovering intermediate vi's on the way there.

This is simply not true. I don't know where you got this absurd falsehood from, but it has no basis in reality. /p/ can turn into /f/ quite easily without a language having the sound /v/ first, because as I already explained, */v/ is not intermediate between /p/ and /f/ in any way*. In fact, it is the other way around, because /p/ and /f/ are both voiceless, and /v/ is just the voiced equivalent of /f/.

Japanese is actually an example of this. It doesn't have /v/, but its historical /p/ sound developed into an /f/ sound.

5) As we have now fully established, you are completely wrong about Japanese, and that disproves your whole argument. You are partially correct about Mandarin, in that Old Mandarin had /v/. However, if we look at Late Middle Chinese, we see that it only had the sound [v] as an allophone (alternate realization) of /f/ in front of j plus a back vowel. So this also disproves your argument, because this is secondary to the development of /f/.

1) You claimed that Spanish and Sardinian have never had a fricative V, you are very wrong, comically so actually. You should scroll up and re-read what you wrote. I've already screenshoted it. They had and still do.
2) You claimed Chinese never had /v , again you were proven wrong.
3) You claimed Japanese never had fricative v either, now claims that since Japanese fricative v does not perfectly match to Greek V, then my argument collapses! LOL! You can't make this up. Let's put the nail on this coffin cause enough with the games:

wiki: on Japanese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_ ... #Weakening

"Weakening
Non-coronal voiced stops /b, ɡ/ between vowels may be weakened to fricatives, especially in fast or casual speech:

/b/ > bilabial fricative [β] /abareru/ > [aβaɾeɾɯ] 暴れる, abareru, 'to behave violently'"

What's that bilabial fricative [β] in their phonetic inventory, weakening from 'B' of all things?


4) Read the previous post one more time and see if you missed something.


Particularly:

"I'm not starting from any assumption, I am stating the obvious. Latins had a fricative v, both while letter v went from oui to [v] but also before! Latin had digamma waw/ w doubling? as fricative f and V for oui but NOT fricative [v]? Really? because you claim B for Anglo-German-Romance and it inconveniences you as you project modern Romance onto Latin, Greek and PIE?

Fricative [v] B is intermediate between pi and fi as defined by all ancient Greek grammarians and the Latin ones, calling B vita(intemediate) as evidenced by the continuum pou -> vou -> fou depending on the occlusion of the obstruancy.

The value [v] did not appear by immaculate conception when the Romans met Jesus or whenever convenient to Erasmians. It simply had a different alfavetical position, a very regular phenomenon, the same value and position it had when it was used to transcribe Basileus.

Cicero puts the nail on the coffin, he relates Greek βινειν with Latin bini. He says that certain words sound similar but mean different things(the former Greek means to copulate and the latter Latin means "paired group") and he cites 'bini et vini' as examples of things that sound similar but mean different things.

Since we know for a fact that Classical Latin vini=ouini. The only value for bini similar to ouini can be [v]ini. A plosive bilabial [b] does not sound similar to [oui] but fricative V does sound similar to oui and many people confuse them still even to the present day inclduing the East Asian people you like to cite so much in error.

Read more here before you make more: viewtopic.php?f=24&t=184137&p=15301916#p15301913

Then scroll up and read the entire thread."

1) You're lying, my comment is still there. Here's what I wrote:

Several dialects of Sardinian have f and p but not v

Since you like wikipedia so much:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sardinian_phonology

v†
† Variable presence, depending on dialect.

2) You're right that Chinese did have /v/ at one point, it just had /f/ first, which proves your argument wrong.

3) So to be clear, your argument is that the Greek χ as in χήρα is a /v/ sound? I just want you to confirm this: you believe that the modern Greek word χήρα begins with a /v/ sound?

3.5) Remember, your argument was that the sound /v/ must first develop in order for the sound /f/ to develop. Japanese developed p > /f/ around 800 years ago, so how does /b/ occasionally being weakened between vowels to [β] in modern Japanese in fast speech have anything to do with this topic?

4) You still never explained Māori having /f/ but no /v/.

5)

I'm not starting from any assumption, I am stating the obvious

This is literally starting from an assumption.

Fricative [v] B is intermediate between pi and fi as defined by all ancient Greek grammarians and the Latin ones, calling B vita(intemediate) as evidenced by the continuum pou -> vou -> fou depending on the occlusion of the obstruancy.

This isn't true I'm afraid, because at the time of those grammarians, φ was pronounced [pʰ] and β [b]. I know you reject this, but you're making a circular argument by assuming the modern Greek values apply to the statements of ancient grammarians.

as evidenced by the continuum pou -> vou -> fou depending on the occlusion of the obstruancy.

This isn't true, there is no spectrum of occlusion going from p to v to f. As I've explained repeatedly, the difference between f and v is that the former is voiceless like p, while the latter is voiced, like b.

6)

'wini' does sound like 'bini'. They are almost the same, the only difference is the former begins with a labial approximant, the latter begins with a labial stop. Cicero isn't just comparing the first two sounds (which are already similar), he's comparing the two words. This is wishful thinking, not evidence.

7) You still never explained Māori:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81ori_phonology

) You posted a link that proved that Sardinian has /v and rely on an abstract undefined disclaimer marked by a cross! Comical. Supposedly this straw of a straw will make B=[b] in Classic Latin, the story goes.
2) Positive evidence that Chinese /f came "first" before /v as your new goal-post has now moved. Your word is totally untrustworthy as you have claimed Spanish does not have a /v sound, along with Sardinian, Chinese, Japanese and all your examples have been PROVEN wrong with evidence and links.
3) What nonsense is this about "Greek χ as in χήρα" ? In case you missed the evidence for Japanese having fricative /β in their phonetic inventory here it is again:

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_ ... #Weakening

"Non-coronal voiced stops /b, ɡ/ between vowels may be weakened to fricatives, especially in fast or casual speech:

/b/ > bilabial fricative [β] /abareru/ > [aβaɾeɾɯ] 暴れる, abareru, 'to behave violently'
/ɡ/ > velar fricative [ɣ] /haɡe/ > [haɣe] はげ, hage, 'baldness'"

Let us consider your "evidence" about Japanese not having fricative v even though the actual evidence says they do: You said "I speak Japanese", no friend you speak Japanese as a foreign language as you do ancient Greek and hence you are totally unaware of Japanese range and actual phonetic reality as you are also totally unaware of Greek phonetic range and reality. This does not even bother you. You speak Japanese and ancient Greek as the average German speaks Spanish and the average Brit speaks Italian. As a foreigner! Yet you profess to have cracked the code of Greek better than the natives! You claim similar about Japanese("but I know the language") & just because you are ignorant of the fricative [β] that means the world needs to turn upside down to justify your ignorance as Lucian attempts to do with Attic. Your evident ignorance though does not determine real Japanese phonetic range just like it does not determine Attic, regardless how many times you exclaim "but I speak it" =/= "I can talk about its phonetic range with certainty!", No, clearly, you can't.


4) Positive Evidence required that Maoris never had any type of /v. Just because you say so, is meaningless.

5) Lingustic ignorance on your part is not my problem. You are evidently unware of how fricatives are built from plosives and how both are obstruents:


Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstruent

"plosives (oral stops), such as [p, t, k, b, d, ɡ], with complete occlusion of the vocal tract, often followed by a release burst;
fricatives, such as [f, s, ʃ, x, v, z, ʒ, ɣ], with limited closure, not stopping airflow but making it turbulent;"

5 b) 'Turbulent'; Halicarnaseus writes in pages 149-151 on Literary Composiiton as translated by Rhys "arterias ypichousis to pneumati' for the fricatives, more turbulent airflow from p(Π) to v(Β) and even more air from v(B) to f,(Φ) hence B is expicitly intermediate and stated to be so by both Thrax and halicarnaseus as sitting in between Π - Φ as Δ is to T -Θ and as Γ is to K-Χ, placing them all in this order (π,β,φ, τ,δ,θ, κ,γ,χ) and not the 'intermediates' first as per Allen. All fricatives relying on turbulence(ypichousis to pneumati) of air as they do in native Greek proper and not in superscripted imaginary nonsense. IN addition the Greek word fyssao=to blow air, makes a lot more sense with fricative f Φ whereby A LOT more air is blownthat with plosive p, pyssao.

Halicarnaseus continues and says Φ,Χ,Θ are the most beautiful kallista)of the sounds as they are voiced with the largest(pollo) amount of pneuma, while plosives p, k, t are the kakistan(the worst sounding) due to a lack of pneuma(AIR from our lungs)

Pneuma applies to M & N and as such the entire theory is demolished as you can't use superscript h for M, N, so you can't do it for the rest either, confusion and misinterpreation rules your narrative and that is why nothing makes sense to you. Your entire theory relies on applying superscript h whever you find the word 'pneuma' in Halicarnaseus. The entire thing. Never did it cross any of your minds that since it applies to all letters, it probably means something other than "aspirate h'.

Papadimitrikapoulos relates:

""The greatest deception of Blass regarding the examination of the teaching by Dionysius Halicarnasseus and the musician Aristides Quintilian on the δασέα is that wherever those use the word πνεῦμα he thinks that they mean «δασὺ πνεῦμα»[='spititus asper'], not having observed that they use the word πνεῦμα in connection with the pronunciation of every sound, therewith meaning the air that is pushed from the windpipe or the pharynx to the mouth, without which no speech sound is possible. Because of this, it is not strange that he misinterpreted the teaching of said writers of rhetoric and in the expression «τὰ δασέα ἐκφωνεῖται πολλῷ πνεύματι»[=the δασέα are pronounced with a lot of πνεῦμα] of Dionysius he saw the existence of 'spiritus asper', which is completely unknown to Dionysius in all his teaching about the pronunciation of the consonants and the vowels”.

Comic relief now made obvious for all to see.

6) Ouini (vini) sounds much closer to vini than it does it to bini(mpini). No matter what acrobatics or lies you assert, reality remains factual.

7) =4? Double time for 4? Just for the impressions. See 4, provide positive evidence that Maori never had any type of fricative v. Once you achieve that explain why both Latins and Greeks would be compared to Maori phonology.

8 ) Binei really hurts doesn't it, you have been using this nitpicked snippet for centuries to convince the ignorant, now that the full text has been served you rely on claiming that [b] is closer to oui than v is closer to oui. Comic relief.

This is how John Pickering, "On the Pronunciation of the Greek Language" page 253 puts it: "very strong evidence, that the Romans did for a long period pronounce their B so nearly like a V, as in general not to be distinguishable from it, at least by the ears of foreigners, just as is the case with the Spaniards at the present day". Even Blass & Sturtenvart cannot escape this reality and concede: "Blass p. 109: "The Latin b too in many places had a similar development [i.e., coincidence with v], being pronounced in the same way that survives at the present day among the Spaniards and many of the French of the south, whose vivere is according to the well known witticism bibere"

9) On one breath you claim [v] as a sound did not exist in either Greek or Latin, on the same breath you assert the supernatural as Kanlis relates: they(.ie Allen, Blass, Erasmians) claim that initially β=b=[b] (and v=[w]), then around year 0 or later β→[v], b→[v], v→[v]. It is as if a black hole was established at [v] a sound allegedly hitherto unexpressed in both languages and sucked all voiced labials of the empire at [v] that allegedly was non-existent among both Latin and Greeks, it now had 3 letters representing the phoneme [v] because something about Maoris, our Lucian claims?

It appears that, in their desperation to justify the "german pronunciation of Greek", these gravely confused people are eager to deny what is in front of their own eyes. A reasonable person can but arrive at one conclusion:

β and b coincided at [v] (or [β]) before I AD and v met them there (on its way from [w]) afterwards!

Here I have presented quite a bit of evidence that B=V. Name 1 single piece of evidence that Allen provides in Vox Latina that B=bilabial plosive MP in Classic Latin.

Just 1, other than "it's got to be cause I assert so".

[noemon]

Farya Faraji:

Hey Farya, I love your work, both musical, historical, philosophical but you have made so many videos trashing the colonial attitudes of the west. The attitude you so much talk about in your videos. That the western mind wants to see you only through its own lens, that the west even convinced the Greeks to ban rebetiko, just like Luke is trying to convince us to pronounce diphthoggos like openAI because he saw it in a luci-an dream contrary to all evidence otherwise.

Luke is of course part of this colonial tradition(consciously or otherwise) which now makes you a part of this colonial tradition you speak so ill about. And of course Luke is not a bad person, nor does he do it consciously, he does it by virtue of being an active part of a western tradition claiming openly that "the Greeks are barbarians who have forgotten their language".

So even if he was right, which he isn't, you should not have been using the colonial arguments that spring from the literary tradition that Luke follows.

But is he correct about ancient Greek? Definitely not. Benjamin Kantor, Buth, Teodorsson have done real legwork on collating relevant evidence and not merely 'indications" like Luke's favorite Sidney Allen whose argument range from the laughable to the childish.

Anyhow read this:

viewtopic.php?f=24&t=184137

I refer to you and previous videos in the post as well.

I took you seriously until you used the petty, childish tactic of "which makes you part of this colonial tradition as well."

Believe me, using petty emotional manipulation and false equivalencies quickly shows you for who you truly are. It takes delusion, mental gymnastics and intellectual dishonesty of an astounding level to brand me, the guy constantly getting shit on by Eurocentrics, as a Eurocentric with a Western colonialistic view of Greece. Sure.

@euklidacragas
13 hours ago (edited)
​ @faryafaraji Our cultures are direct and not keen on subterfuge. You have written volumes against euro-centrism, but when you replayed a Koine Greek song, you consulted a US helicopter pilot to help you with your Greek to be "accurate".

And you do not see any kind of contradiction there? This you believe is totally consistent with your anti-Eurocentric messages. Well, it just isn't [consistent] and someone had to point this out to you given your crystal clear anti-euro-centric/orientalist videos.

Even if Luke is Christ reborn and has received the holy spirit of Greek vocals, your choice would still be contradictory to your message. Moreover, when you used the petty "quiet greek nationalists, I know what you 're going to say but I reject it cause you greek nationalists and I did my [American-based] homework" in your Seikilos video you did not participate in the same kind of colonial elitism that you denounce in your own videos...and god forbid anybody points this out to you, right?

I do not believe you did this because you had any malicious intent, I think it was just a lapse in judgement, though your subsequent reply makes me question my idea about your character.

If you were or are in doubt, I am fully aware of your work against Euro-centrism and I applaud you for it.

Nay, I love you for it.

And that is why my jaw dropped on the floor when I saw you adopting a Eurocentric narrative and I felt I had to tell this to you. Not because I believe you are Eurocentric, it's clear you are not, but out of fear you may become, which frankly the way you pre-emptively dismiss any and all potential Greek replies as "nationalist" shows that you are looking down on those people and their traditions a priori.

Now, all personal petty childish nonsense aside, please understand that this neither about me, you or Luke.

So please do take a moment or 2 to read my politicsforum.org thread, you will learn something more about the Erasmian/Hellenic controversy both historically and in the present and your knowledge on the particular subject will expand significantly.

I have watched your videos 10-100 times each and reposted them in all the social media and groups I am humanely capable to, do me this favor and read a few words I put together just once! Luke makes huge errors that are not consistent with his actual knowledge, meaning that he has the knowledge to know he is wrong, but he doesnt care much. Reading my thread in the forum, this will become very obvious to you and it will also become if you read his replies to my comments in his Φ,Θ,Χ video where he misrepresents Thrax by more than mile without a second thought to spare.

Luke attacks Karagounis because Karagounis addressed the straws of Blass and by addressing those straws he became as guilty as Blass, but Karagounis has well been surpassed by others, which is of course why Luke talks about Karagounis and not the others. Easy target for easy likes for easy groupthink. Greeks themselves have identified the issues of Karagounis and once again Luke merely copy/pastes pre-existing arguments against him and makes not a single original point.

Of course no word about Blass who made the same & original straws in reverse that Karagounis is addressing because that would undermine Luke's tradition and Blass' ancestor, Sidney Allen.

The worst kind of colonialism is the philhellenic type, the insidious type as you yourself analyse in your videos. The type that comes in peace and then projects its own images while generalizing against an entire culture as "nationalists" pre-emptively thus anticipating any reaction, as something to be dismissed a priori, so whatever one says just by virtue of disagreeing & arguing they then "show their true colours" that you have apriori projected over an entire culture. And the loop continues.

You know Farya, we 're not all crazy nationalists, we have academies, universities, logic, scholars & brain to be able to talk about well our own native language.

I am married to an Anglo-Iranian woman. I don't ask an American person to tell me about older or modern Iranian language, I ask the Iranian academics, friends, artists that I can get my hands on because well that seems the normal thing to do.

Khoda fez.

---------------------

And:

Thank you Farya, your vowels are excellent and your music and video is wonderful as always. As a Greek person it sounds precisely as it should.

Of course languages go through changes, however the only languages in the planet with no non-sibilant fricatives are some opaque tribes in Australia. This is what is 'flat-earth'.

Luke is not a bad person but he is part of the Erasmian/Allenian tradition and so he is still within the constraints of a grievously racist, orientalist tradition that derides anything and anyone who disagrees.

Before Sidney Allen, Erasmians used to pronounce a single letter in two separate syllables like ink-horn for inxorn. Despite realising the plani, instead of correcting they doubled down. So they proclaimed that no fricative sounds could have existed. This is flat-earthism gone insane.

Unfortunately I cannot post links, but I have written a particularly interesting thread in a forum, translating Thrax, Halicarnaseus and Aristotles Poetics in the process finding numerous mistranslations to the extent of entire sentences.

Halicarnaseus describes the consonants to the t. Your input would be helpful actually.

β,δ,γ, φ,θ,χ are particularly important for Erasmians(including Luke) and so they defend their misconceptions with militance and derision.

The issue is that this entire theory is part of the series of the genesis of the "Aryan" Indo-German theories when Germans needed these vowels constant so they can project them all the way down to the Yamnya culture. Flat-earth for the European 17-20th century elites.

It is quite astonishing that despite the debunking, Allen and Luke continue this tradition.

I'm confident Luke and the consensus of Western academics don't have literally everything right, a fact they openly and consistently admit to. Luke even disagrees with Allen on many fundamental points. What I do object to is the branding of a person like Luke as an "Erasmian" when he has done more to debunk Erasmian pronunciation than anyone else on YouTube.

The aspect that Luke refers to most often as "flat earthism" is the idea that Greek's pronunciation today is literally the same as in Antiquity, the view espoused by Karagounis. It's functionally the only thing that he and Allen share in common with Erasmus: the opinion that Greek was pronounced differently over the course of Antiquity, (which is not an opinion, it's a fact.) Other than that, their approaches too Ancient Greek phonology are far too diverse and fraught with disagreement for them all to be put in a general "Erasmian" terminological basket.

Luke is a "every language's phonology changed over time and Greek is no exception-ian." Not an Erasmian.

I'm the first to openly slaughter the West's history of Orientalism towards Greece whenever it's warranted, but I don't think the work of Allen and Luke is remotely comparable to that of 19th century Western views on Greek music, or to Erasmus for that matter, and I think it would be a case of throwing the baby with the bathwater. Just because the West has had a horrible history of mishandling Greece doesn't mean everything that comes out of it is therefore related to Orientalism.

Just because you don't think it may be so, it doesn't mean your impression is correct. There is very clear evidence that Allen and Luke are exactly like Erasmus and Blass with a revised view but who still totally misrepresent ancient Greek grammarians by miles(dasea, psila, mesa present a real nightmare for them) and popular arguments, like "binein=βινειν" that says the exact opposite of what they claim it does by misquoting and nitpicking the text.

Cicero says that βινειν and bini sound similar, but have different meaning(the former means 'to copulate' in Greek and the later means "pair" in Latin). He then says certain words sound similar but have different meanings and he cites 1 example "bini et vini". Vini=ouini. Plosive mpini similar to ouini? Of course not, but if b=v then vini et ouini=similar but different meanings. How could they miss that? How could they miss that Halicarnaseus uses 'pneuma' for every single letter including M, N, but Allen and Luke translate "pneuma" as "daseia accent", aspirate on the M, sure why not? These are not "honest mistakes", they are intentional. Instead of focusing on whether Greek is effectively the same from 300BCE or 400BCE or 100 CE onwards, one can focus on the actual arguments and not on "populist" & simplistic arguments.

Romans discovered how to fricatise their obstruent pi's to get fricative fi's, but skipped discovery of fricative & intermediate (between p and f) Vi's from their phonetic inventory until Jesus? This is flat-earthism. Humans cannot fricative fi's without first fricatising their plosive pi's to vi's, all these obstruents exist in a chromatic and air-in-the-mouth continuum. They are not blurted out by Logic Pro's.

The Romans couldn't vocalise, but pocalised instead? What? And this passes as something "scientific consensus", this is a religion, a eurocentric, antihellenic religion that will sacrifice anything to project modern day German and Romance to Latin, Greek and then PIE. Greek changed but German B, G, D, have been so since the beginning of time the claim goes. They reconstructed unattested PIE and then reconstructed well-attested Latin and Greek( that come with their own grammar and pronunciation text books as well as a polytonic system for Greek to maintain Attic in particular) on the basis of their unattested reconstructed PIE? How are such things still flying around as "academic", that is a good question to ponder.

Allen copy/pastes Blass(progenitor of 'aryo-nazism') minus the "nazism" and Luke copy/pastes Allen verbatim in regards to the fricatives.

Reading his pages from Vox Graeca(around page 19 if I recall correctly) or watching Luke's video is one and the same thing, same arguments, same examples to the t. More to the point, this topic is not a soup or a binary, Greek changes at some point so the one who postures as the "every-man" has to be right by virtue of posturing as such. This is not a valid argument, nor is this topic a simplistic binary.

Every letter is particular and requires particular examination. Sound changes obviously happen, but when and where is a different subject.

Ionic had no h aspirate for example, Attic did until it didn't after 402 BCE. At 330 BCE Attic was established as the koine(common) standard RP by Philipp of Macedon and standardised as such, and taught as such until 1453 by an official state authority and under the Ottomans by the schools that remained with a lot less students and schools available but the flame was never put out, scribes, grammarians, still existed.

Rome stopped teaching standard Latin at 400AD, hence it was no longer constrained by a standardised education system and developed into modern Romance as no central standard education remained in place.
Greek on the other had remained insular due to the hold the standardised system have over the popualtion within its legal boundaries. English diverges in the UK from London to Manchester but not to the point of being declared a separate language and hence why Greek is not linguistically speaking a separate language while Romance are separate from Classical Latin. Another thing that grinds Luke's gears to a huge extent. And beside even Luke's tradition accepts Greek has remained unchanged since the 1st CE, that is 2000 years. It's the 1st BCE that hurts them because if it crosses into 1st BCE they will have to revise their Latin and start using vis for B instead of bi's and how can Romance people aside from spaniards ever conceive that? It's a couple of decades that bothers them actually. Hence why they present Dafne but neglect the earlier inscriptions that undo their theories. Making this argument of "significant change" during the couple of decades of Jesus largely laughable. Greek unchanged for 2000 years but in -100 to 0 it underwent massive change. It's nonsense. Their issues is not Greek but Classical Latin, god forbid they have to admit B=V for Latin, then the entire German, indo-aryan theory collapses. And hence why they project their insecurities about their western languages remaining unchanged in the significant consonants. On one breath they claim Greek changed, because eveything changes on the other they assert, modeern Romance consonants are 100% accurate for Classical Latin. Never ever being bothered by assserting even more crazy nationalism.

You wrote:

"the opinion that Greek was pronounced differently over the course of Antiquity, (which is not an opinion, it's a fact.)"

"Antiquity"? Luke himself admits it does so from the 1st AD onward, is that not "antiquity" enough in people's vocabulary? Buth calls Luke's distinctions to claim those changes as "significant" as totally "adiafora"(inconsequential) right to his own face in the ibiblio forum. The round y exists in Modern Greece, the long heta and longer still epsilon iota they still exist today, Modern Greek dialects diverge in their own right. It's not just modern standard Athenian, there is plenty more, the aspirate written or not is still spoken and sung with or without diacritics. because breaths are still taken wehn vowelising and these breaths will always throw a random h, either inhales or exahles. Plosives aplenty with Arvanitakis' 'Dynata'.

Plato in Cratylus complains about iotacism in Attic(something Erasmians claim happened much later), he says that people replace their iotas with hetas H and epsilon iotas EI thinking them "grander beings"., inaccordance with even 'standard' modern Greek. He says that imera(ιμερα) has now become hmera(ημερα). Η and EI standing for iota already in Plato' time? Another thing ignored and buried under subterfuge.

Buth calls Luke's chronology problematic, Buth pushes Luke's 1st AD claim to 3rd BCE instead. Which presents a real issue when projecting modern-Romance to classical Latin(the actual beef here), hence the incredulity, "Greek cannot be so old, it is 2000 years old granted BUT not 2001 years old". They present DAFNE from post 0 but forget that we have much earlier inscriptions from Republican Rome. This issue they have also undermines Lucian as it undermines its right to exist and why would a fallacious guess exist anyway? When we have a real living thing far closer to any reconstruction and which if learned and cultivated one can understand how it diverges too and from there understand how it diverged in the past. Instead we call this beautiful native thing 'incapable' and throwing it asunder as "significantly" changed. So don't learn a real living language where you can see these changes within its present dialects, learn my "educated" guess instead based on misrepresentations of Thrax, Halicarnaeus and visibly mistranslated Aristotle's Poetics along with a series of incredulous arguments.

There is no perfect here, but the living is far closer than any of the variants or versions peddled by euro-centrists for the past 5 centuries for a fact!

And it's living, it diverges as the previous one did. It contains aesthetic vagaries only living things can teach.

This is a case of seeing the glass not half empty but almost totally empty when the glass is actuallly about to overflow. And if Luke does not engage in this kind of glass half-empty, then what is the point of Lucian? to create babel-tower for a single dialect? If Luke accepts Buth's chronology and the arguments of the ancient grammarians, Lucian's out. Done, dustbin of history, just like all its previous Erasmian iterations. So this is a life-or death problem for Erasmians, how do you admit all your errors. But the real Greek language is not dependent on such factors, that should be plain obvious.

You mention Karagounis, I guess because Luke mentions him, he is very outdated, and his errors are Blass's erros that Karagounis counters. Not his own.

Hatzidakis is more updated and Kanlis even more [updated].

I talk about Blass, and often I hear retorts "Blass is old-school", see Allen, Luke said that to me more than once.

But when Luke argues against Karagounis, where is the analog? Why is he not addressing Hatzidakis or Kanlis, who are contemporary?

Because Luke argues against the easy for the image, to undermine a tradition using straw-men but not the difficult cause that would present real problems.

What is certain however is that Lucian and Erasmian share the exact same misconceptions about the fricatives, and they are 100% in error as proven both by Hatzidakis/Kanlis but also by the Erasmian representative in Greece, Papadimitrakopoulos.

Luke & Allen misinterpret ancient Greek grammarians in regards to 'psila, mesa and dasea aphona', not by a little, not by a comma, but by thousands of miles to maintain their theories. Cicero, vivi nonsense, and other strawmen that only serve to impress impressions and convince the ignorant.

[noemon]

Here are some more pearls by Luke Ranieri:

The errors of the Erasmians are simply too many to list but here are 2 eye-popping examples:

1) From the transliterations A(h)uramazda↔Ωρομάζης, Artavazdâ↔Ἀρτάβαζος, the Erasmians conclude ([STUR20]<|>, p. 189; [BLAS90]<|>, p. 118; [ALLE87]<|>, p. 58) that Ζ[zd], but not that Ω↔[a(h)u] (first example) or that Β↔[v] (second example). Assuming that the "latinised" names are faithful representations not only of the original Old-Persian names (which I have not been able to confirm), but most importantly of the pronounced or written names that the ancient Greek writers used as basis for the transliterated "hellenised" forms (which can in no way be confirmed), the selective mapping of Ζ, but not of Ω and Β, should have raised a few eyebrows, but it went through uncontested.


2) Erasmians love citing ΒΗΒΗ as the sound the sheep makes but dismiss AU AU as the sound the dog makes because that confirms Modern Greek f and v for u. Despite, the fact that AU AU is far more clear than BH BH due to H being written in the Attic rather than Ionic alphabet, where H was E and which you mention in your video as well. So Erasmians demonstrate a religious rather than a scientific conviction. As they dismiss the factually correct way in one case and adopt a factually incorrect way in another case simply because that matches Northern European pronunciations of Greek in Latin text!!! Which is really the crux of their argument.

polýMATHY PLUS

You need to educate yourself in this matter, as your knowledge of the subject is too poor to make these sorts of declarations. If you’re Greek, I recommend: http://ins.web.auth.gr/index.php?option ... 70&lang=en

I'm ignorant of Allen, guy claims, no word on the argument, just an ignorant dude surfing the interwebs!

@polyMATHY Spamming Allen, does not address a very simple argument presented to you.

So unable to leave the challenge unanswered he gathers:

@Philoglossos
22 hours ago
From the transliterations A(h)uramazda↔Ωρομάζης,

I'm no expert on the phonological history of Persian, but in Middle Persian it was Ōhrmazd, so clearly ahu > ō happened at some point, thus the Greek rendering would simply be a bit of evidence for the date of that shift in Persian.

but dismiss AU AU as the sound the dog makes because that confirms Modern Greek f and v for u

or that Β↔[v] (second example).

This is an incredibly silly argument for a very simple reason, which is that languages that don't have /v/ will pretty much always render it with their own /b/ sound. See, for instance, English loans into Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and many other languages.

dismiss AU AU as the sound the dog makes because that confirms Modern Greek f and v for u.

The stereotypical dog barking noise in English is literally 'bow wow' pronounced /bæw wæw/ despite the fact that both /v/ and /f/ are present in English. A dog's bark being transcribed AU doesn't in any universe point towards the final element being a labiodental fricative.


The issue here is that you aren't interested in any kind of internally consistant system for actually explaining evidence we observe across languages. That's what linguists are interested in - it has really nothing to do with Erasmus, but rather from a consistent application of what we know about language in general to Greek. You simply cannot explain the Greek evidence if all you know about is Greek, especially not if you are ideologically driven.

To give an analogy, gravity works just the same in your kitchen as it does everywhere else, but if you never leave your kitchen, you won't be able to develop the same understanding of how gravity works as you would if you observed the universe broadly.

Right, anything that you can't explain, is someone else's shift except Romance & German(b,d,g) = ETERNAL.

The abstract stuff about gravity are more funny than apt. You haven't really said anything substantive out of fear presumably of saying something that you may regret but first of all, these examples cited here clearly show that the tradition you follow DOES NOT apply rules consistently as you nitpick ZD but skip Omega and B=V. And second, clearly, you are totally unfamiliar with modern languages as well as Plato's Cratylus.

Human Languages do not follow natural laws, nor do they follow lingo-math(where you take the word 'pneuma' that applies to all the letters, and apply it recursively only to the superscripted consonants of your choice. How do you not see the contradiction from what you just said?

The fact that 'pneuma' in Halicanrnaseus as demonstrated applies to all letters including M,N, should give you a hint that it IS NOT spiritus asper.

Second, people eat their sounds as they do in Camden just because they feel like it, they are following a natural law, they just like what they are doing, and not because of your invented linguinistic-math that you apply recursively in a language where the exception is the rule! but purely out of aesthetics as Plato informs us in Cratylus 418a where he complains about iotacism for H and EI due to aesthetics of them replacing iota due to them being "grander beings" or calmer like hmeros/hremos:

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/te ... page%3D418

Honestly, like this is easier than arguing with trolls in PoFo. His arguments are of lower quality than the trolls that reside in this forum!


More:

Right, anything that you can't explain, is someone else's shift except Romance & German(b,d,g) = ETERNAL.

Where did you get the idea that linguists think any aspect of Romance or German phonology is eternal?

You haven't really said anything substantive

I did, you just ignored the substance (where I directly responded to your claims and showed how they didn't make sense). If all I had done was make the analogy, this would be a reasonable complaint.

the tradition you follow DOES NOT apply rules consistently as you nitpick ZD but skip Omega and B=V.

This is a lie. I explained in my previous comment how neither of your objections pose any problem to linguists, you simply chose to pretend I didn't. If you'd like to respond to what I actually said instead of strawmanning, let me know.

Human Languages do not follow natural laws,

Of course they do. Human language is a natural phenomenon, and we know an immense amount about how it works and how it evolves through observation.

where you take the word 'pneuma' that applies to all the letters, and apply it recursively only to the superscripted consonants of your choice. How do you not see the contradiction from what you just said?

I didn't say anything contradictory, you said something completely incoherent and then attributed it to me.

Your last paragraph is completely incoherent to me. I don't know what relevance any of this has to anything in my previous comment.

1) Don't have [v] you claim but b interchanges internally in Latin with v, Allen never provided any evidence that B was ever [b], Greek β magically becomes [v], though again Allen never established its [b] value and Latin V also becomes [v] all at the same time, and somehow all these were sucked into [v] that hitherto according to Allen did not EVEN exist as a phoneme in either Greek or Latin! No contradiction or eyebrow raised! Just comic relief.

Of course, I already addressed this silly argument on our previous conversation and hence why I did not bother repeating myself again. You chose Zd, but ignored AV and B=V. Yet you claim "we are lingo-mathematicians who apply rules consistently". The contradiction totally flying over your face.

2) The dog in Greek goes γαβ(ghav) in case you were not aware. Using Greek mpeee when bleating is βελαζω(velazo) and when the "fool" would not be so had he said it correctly again skips your orthologic comprehension of Greek. Here, you are nitpicking some obscure English convention about the sound of dogs, apply it to Greek, ignore the Greek convention that you use for mpee, while posturing that you are being "mathematically" consistent by rules equal to those of gravity.

You are consistent indeed regarding your permanent nitpicking and selective bias.
Your argument is evidence of your selective bias rather than the verity of yet another silly argument that postures as applying math-rules consistently!

3) Allen recursively applies the word 'pneuma' from Halicarnaseus to all the dasea aphona, but Dionysius applies PNEUMA to ALL the letters, including M,N and the non-dasea, every single one.

How are you not super-scripting h to M,N then? You just claimed you are following math-rules, allegedly. You shamelessly compare your selective bias and misinterpretations of pneuma to "gravity"?

Allen's lingo-math superscript h collapse on its face.

4) You know how to ignore Plato's Cratylus(too much iotacism for your taste and too much aesthetics for math) as well as slang and dialects that simply do not follow whatever gravity law you claim to have discovered but have not defined or even uttered.


5) Of course Allen claims that Romance-German b,d,g are eternal, he is projecting them to Latin, Greek, and PIE, without providing, 1 not a single 1 piece of evidence for this claim. It just is!

At this point, I'm just feeling sorry for the guy, he has devoted his entire life and makes a living out of a language he does not understand, and here comes a layman with no specialized education on ancient Greek but purely natively inherent, undoing everything he knows and everything he has built his career upon. Choices and adults and all that!

1) Your incredulity isn't an argument. Where is the contradiction? What is immaculate here? You yourself just read about a similar process beginning in Japanese, where for some speakers in casual/fast speech, /b/ can become a bilabial fricative~approximant between vowels, a sound that doesn't otherwise exist in the language. We know through observation that stops often spontaneously become fricatives between vowels. We also know through observation that languages spontaneously develop new sounds through regular sound shifts all the time.

We choose Zd, but ignore AV and B=V.

You are lying. I directly adressed all sounds in the name 'ahuramazda', you simply ignored what I wrote so that you could pretend I ignored the rest of the name. Why do you lie when my comment is still right there?

2) I am well aware that in modern Greek the stereotypical sound for a dog is γαβ. The issue is that this doesn't even begin to support the idea that ancient Greek αυ was pronounced αβ. Do you think Greek dogs have a special way of barking?

Here's the issue: we both know that a sheep objectively never makes a sound resembling /vi/. We also both know that the sound a dog makes when it barks doesn't sound any more like γαβ than it does like 'bow-wow'. This is just obvious to anyone with ears.

3) I still don't know what you're talking about. How about you respond to what I've said, instead of changing the subject to random things you think Allen says?

4) At this point you're just bringing up random irrelevancies so you can pretend there are issues I'm 'ignoring', all while you ignore the actual points I've made. If you actually have a point you'd like to make regarding slang or dialects, feel free to make it! Just mentioning that slang and dialects exist adds nothing to this conversation. You might as well tell me I'm ignoring your mother's favorite coffee shop.['/quote]

1) It is not incredulity, that is your way of straw-manning this very obvious impossibility. A phoneme[v] did not exist but it sucked in 3 letters from 2 separate civilizations spread from the Black Sea to Spain as if a black hole! Linguistically comical!

2) The sound /v exists in the Japanese phonetic inventory hence its usage, yet another fallacy of yours as well as a false analogy as V is a very well-established phoneme in both Latin and Greek diachronically.

Good thing you finally conceded Japanese /v which you insisted on a lie consistently because allegedly you "speak japanese", the problem of you being a foreign speaker and totally unaware of japanese phonetic range did not even cross your mind. You opted to turn Japanese upside down and claim lies for it, instead of concede your fallacy earlier, just like you are doing precisely the same for Greek which is also a foreign language to you. Anything as long as b,d,g can be projected to Latin, Greek and PIE as 'eternal' in service of Anglo-German Aryan jingoism, without a single argument establishing these phonemes positively in either Latin or Greek!

3) I trashed the animal sounds argument as did Aristotle in Poetics, one has to be a bit slow to use this or a propagandist.
I am merely demonstrating Allen's bias for treating it as valid for sheep(by misrepresenting the context of the text as well) but ONLY when it suits him and ignore it when it doesn't, ie for dogs. I am also telling you that your claims for consistent lingo-math collapse on their face when you parrot the same.

4) At this point, Allen's fallacies and contradictions have become CRYSTAL-CLEAR, your lack of argument means nothing. It is not only ignorant people that read these comments. And besides I am mirroring them across several social media.

If you want to be taken seriously, you should say something substantive instead of engaging in ad-homs.

5) As for Ahuramazda, you are imagining things, you never explained why you skipped B=V. You just threw a comment that Iranian changed. Prove it.

6) Kindly ask you not to mention my "mother" in any context, shape or form. It invites me to retort, creating a vicious cycle. Or any other ad-hom, more importantly, it further demonstrates your desperation and inability to make cogent arguments in defense of your narrative that you even portray as "natural law" equal to gravity!

7) Again you are confusing yourself, you have not defined lingo-math laws of 'gravity' and yet you want me to address your undefined argument by imagining what you mean. Ludicrous. You asserted a claim, elaborate and prove your claim!

[noemon]

In addition, notice Latin exchange censorship practice continuing:

Question Asked: When did ph start being pronounced like f??

The correct answer, of course, is that ph was always [f] as it transcribed fricative Φ which we already demonstrated conclusively, using epigraphy & ancient Grammar, while Latin digamma F was most probably related to waw /w as it was also that in Greek & Phoenician from where it was adopted into Latin(but somehow magically landed as modern English [f] during its adoption), and not fricative [f] until F did become fricative [f] in Latin starting from before the 1st BCE.

As Randall Buth explains, speech precedes writing by a lot, when you see 2 letters being confused, they are already quite equal for the user and NOT on the way of becoming equal, they have already become so. As users of the forum, we use various conventions for letters that we consider equal to what the reader is reading.

The acolytes of Erasmian and Allenian, hide facts from the public so that they can maintain their fantasies.

So,

Allenian responds by quoting Allen, that we have Dafne from Δαφνη from 1st CE onwards. This is okay for Latins, because it is at the end of the Classical Latin period and so, it does not force them to revise the projected Anglo-German sounds of Classical Latin, at least so they pretend, but if you mention anything earlier, then the shit literally hit the fan as they cannot psychologically accept a revision of Latin B,D,G as not being as they are in modern Anglo-German, because as we observed they projected their supremacist jingoism all the way down to PIE(Proto-Indo-German later renamed to European).

I sent real epigraphies with sources that our earliest example is from before 88 BCE. They deleted my posts, they deleted my account and then replied to my message with the nonsense below, just check it.

I wrote:

The earliest Roman inscriptions of Greek Φ for F we have is from 88 BCE, which is more than one century older than Dafne.

As reported here:

"Trois inscriptions républicaines présentent un f en regard d’un φ" in English "Three republican inscriptions have a f for a φ"

See my reply on your previous question here.

Reply by Asteroides.

Based on discussion by Latin grammarians such as Diomedes and Priscian, plus interchange between "PH" and "F" in spelling (nicely summarized by the graph in Alex B.'s answer) it seems clear [f] was a usual pronunciation of PH in Latin by the 5th century AD. (I'm confident in this as a terminus ante quem.)

Dating when this pronunciation began to be used is a bit tricky. There are several possible inscriptional examples of F used for Greek Φ before the 1st century AD. (It seems however that the identification of the letter or of the name is sometimes arguable.)

CIL I² 2652: The reading HELIOFO seems to be generally accepted, although an alternative reading HELIODO(RUS) has apparently been considered. Biville dates this inscription to before 88 BC. The inscription appears on a altar in a shrine next to the entrance of House 1D in the Stadion/Stadium district of Delos. In support of the reading HELIOFO, the name ΗΛΙΟΦΩΝ appears written in Greek script inside of House 1D. I haven’t found a photo of this inscription yet. Zarmakoupi 2016:65 cites Plassart 1916:211 as a source.

CIL I² 753 has been read as showing the name "ORFEUS" but it has been argued that "ORPEUS" is actually the correct reading (Buchholz 2014:260). Biville dates this inscription to 59 BC (citing Biville 1990:191).

CIL I² 1413 has been read as showing the name "FEDRA" (Buchholz 2014:260), but it has been argued that "FLORA" is actually the correct reading (Adams 2007:82, citing ILLRP 809). Purnelle 1995:228 dates the inscription to the first century BC and likewise notes the doubt about whether it reads "FEDRA" or "FLORA".

(These bullets were written in response to a deleted answer by a now-deleted user that cited Frédérique Biville's Les emprunts du latin au grec: Introduction et consonantisme, 1990:191, which mentions these three inscriptions as examples of Republican Latin use of F for Φ.)

However, there are reasons to suppose that in the first century AD, the identification of the sounds of "PH" and "F" by Latin speakers was not complete (regardless of whether it had begun). Quintilian, writing in about 95 AD, implies in the following passages that the sound of Latin ⟨F⟩ did not occur in Greek:

"nam contra Graeci adspirare ei solent, ut pro Fundanio Cicero testem qui primam eius litteram dicere non possit inridet." (Institutio Oratoria 1.4.14)

"Et velut in locum earum succedunt tristes et horridae, quibus Graecia caret. Nam et illa quae est sexta nostrarum, paene non humana voce vel omnino non voce potius inter discrimina dentium effiandaest; quae, etiam cum vocalem proxima accipit quassa quodam modo, utique quotiens aliquam consonantem frangit, ut in hoc ipso frangit, multo fit horridior." (Institutio Oratoria 12.10.28)

(The exact interpretation of these passages has been subject to a certain amount of debate; in particular, before the second passage, Quintilian gives two Greek words as illustrations of two pleasant Greek sounds that Latin lacks, and it is debated what the words and what the Greek sounds in question were.)

It is clear that Greek speakers systematically used Φ to represent Latin "F", starting from an earlier point than the frequent use of F in Latin to represent Greek Φ. The consensus is that this convention initially was a case of Greek speakers using an aspirated bilabial plosive [pʰ] as the closest sound in their native inventory to a labial fricative [f]. There are examples of similar adaptations in modern languages, such as Korean 커프스 [kʰʌpʰɯsʰɯ] from English cuffs. (Of course, after Greek Φ had attained its current pronunciation as a labial fricative, the equivalence to Latin F is trivial.)

The use of Φ in Greek of all periods as the regular representation of Latin "F" raises the possibility that early cases of inscriptional "F" for Φ might represent the pronunciation of a native Greek speaker with Latin as a second language, rather than indicating a correspondence between the sounds of "PH" and "F" in the mouths of native Latin speakers. I am not sure however if this explanation is plausible for any of the specific inscriptions cited above.

So what is this guy saying?

1) I am absolutely correct, these inscriptions DO exist, but where he sees F for Φ, he imagines a P, because...well just because, could be a theory. Recall what Randall Buth tells us about speech and writing. "Not happening, but happened, done".
2) My point is even more buttressed because he states conclusively that Greeks use Φ to transliterate Latin F from even earlier and with no fail, of course for them this means nothing at all. Just a coincidence, Greeks used the next "closest thing" because as they erroneously claim they were unable to pronounce both [v] and [f], because well because they say so.
3) Then he relates his speculation about 'Fundanius', but dares not to provide you ANY details about the debate and the preceding examples because that would show even more conclusively that their misleading conclusions do not follow.

Now let us see what Randall Buth has to say on the subject:



Notice how the author here tells you that we have evidence from before 88BCE, but he is also asserting that despite all this evidence this only "happened" completely in the 5th AD, notice that the 5th AD is the same date Ranieri is using in his debate with Buth. And Buth is correcting, not 1st-5th AD, but 3rd-1st BCE instead. "Not happening, but happened, done"

The shamelessness, censorship, and subterfuge of the community are just a sight to behold.

Imagine doing this to the Jewish people about Hebrew inscriptions proving Hebrew and these people deleting them from public view to maintain a narrative that "modern Hebrew is not really Hebrew".



Honest user is asking simple obvious question in Aug 24, 2021 at 20:02, that is 2,5 years ago.

What do you think, why isn't transliterating "phi" as "p" more common? Why were Romans who did not speak Greek able to hear the difference between 'ph' and 'p', when modern English speakers are not?

Of course not just English people, but Luke Ranieri on the video above openly states that almost no European person can hear the difference between their imagined ph and p.

Then the same moderator(cmw) that deleted my Answers and user account says something about "Thai" and replied to his question yesterday at the same time he deleted my posts and user account.

@FlatAssembler Plenty of languages today distinguish between ph and p, Thai being one. Here's a list of them. –

No list that actually says what the user is asking of course. If the Greeks spoke p when they wrote φ, then why did the Latins use ph and not just P?

Erasmians/Allenians cannot deal with simple basic logic it seems.

[noemon]

Based on the process of lenition, and given that 'pneuma' does not refer to "aspiration" in any way shape or form, neither in Aristotle, nor in Thrax, nor in Halicarnaseus, we can safely conclude that:

Attic plosive Π,Τ,Κ weakened to fricative ΠH,TH,KH. As the Athenians did not have specific letters for these fricative vocals yet the Athenians used H to distinguish them from plosive Π,Τ,Κ.

After this process solidified, Athens adopted Ionic letters Φ,Θ,Χ to represent these now well-established fricative vocals as monograph letters at 402 BCE.

For the Ionians, these letters & phonemes were already well established in both phonetic inventory and in their alphabet which was adopted by the Athenians in 402 BCE.

This explains why so-called "aspirate" /h is not found in Ionic, EVER(not "dropped" as Erasmians & wiki claim, it's simply not found, full stop).
And nor is it found in Attic ever again post-402 BCE, because it never was an 'aspirate' in Attic but a signifier of lenition that was no longer required due to the adoption of dedicated letters for these fricatives. The modern polytonic system of daseia/oxeia was invented later by Aristophanes of Byzantium and Attic writers not only did not use it, they were not even aware of it!

This means that the "modern" values of Φ,Θ,Χ are even older than 402 BCE in Ionic.

This is consistent with Halicarnaseus' descriptions of dasea Φ,Θ,Χ as the most beautiful(kratista) of these consonants and plosives Π,Τ,Κ as the ugliest(kakista) of them on account of a full breathy air for the former(pollo to pneuma) modulating the chords(arterias ypichousis to pneumati) and no or a lot less air for the latter.

It is also consistent with the categories psila(light), mesa(intermediate) & dasea(hoarse) as described by all three aforementioned, consistent with their actual use, and consistent with the fact that almost no European ear can distinguish between "aspirated and non-aspirated plosives". Think pot and stop.

The Allenian/Erasmian theory claims that in Attic they used f(/φ) for p in pot to designate its difference from p in stop! Yes, you heard that right. Athenians adopted new letters by a tyrrant to designate an imaginary aspiration that exists within the range of p for pot and p for stop.

Lenition is also consistent for the reason why the Latins would use ph,th,kh to render these vocals in agreement with Athenians since they also lacked dedicated letters for these fricatives and not P,T,K because if Φ,Θ,Χ were "aspirated plosives" when the Latins transcribed them, they would not have been able to hear the difference with their non-aspirated counterparts Π,Τ,Κ. See pot and stop as above. Classical Latins also use pronounced B as a /β like the Spanish, South French, some North Italians, Sardinians, Greeks, Japanese(in the examples below) and very likely others I am not aware of.

As H was no longer required in Attic to distinguish the fricatives from the plosives due to the addition of Ionic letters, it fixed itself as Heta and interchanged with Iota(i) and Epsilon Iota(ei) as Plato informs us in Cratylus(418a).

Β,Δ,Γ = /β/δ/γ is the intermediate lenition of Π,Τ,Κ and hence the term "intermediates", mesa by all 3 grammarians.

Φ,Θ,Χ = /φ /θ /χ is the full lenition.

The ultra-plosive B,D,G were already ascribed as MΠ, NT, ΝΚ even more accurately using the liquids(M,N) to create an extra nasal explosion of the plosives.

So from pure plosive(psila) Π,Τ,Κ we get 2 further sets of weakened consonants by modulating the breath as Halicarnaseus explicitly tells us('arterias ypichousis to pneumati'):

Π,Τ,K = /p /t /k pure plosive=psila=kakista=worst because no air from the lungs modulating the sounds
Β,Δ,Γ = /β /δ /γ intermediate lenition=mesa
Φ,Θ,Χ = /φ /θ /χ full lenition=dasea=kratista=best because plenty of air from the lungs modulating the sounds
MΠ/ΜΒ, NT/ΝΔ, ΝΚ/ΓΓ; = /b,/d,/g The extra set of boosted(via the explosive nasals) plosives, as in modern English, German, etcetera.

Red=labials
Blue=dentals
Black=velars

If a language contains all 4 sets of these consonants, there is not much other place for them to go to other than drop some of them, or not. Aspirated vs non-aspirated are not distinguished by separate letters in Greek or Latin as the difference between pot and stop is meaningless and certainly does not warrant the introduction of separate letters either in Greek or in Latin and it never has during their entire existence.

We see the exact same Lenition process in Germanic with Verner's law explaining how pater becomes father, /p -->/f, /t -->/δ and not pater with superscript aspirate h to allegedly denote the difference between pot and stop as the Erasmian/Allen's nonsense claim it was in Attic.

We also see the exact same lenition process in Japanese where b weakens to /β and g weakens to /γ:

/b/ > bilabial fricative [β] /abareru/ > [aβaɾeɾɯ] 暴れる, abareru, 'to behave violently'
/ɡ/ > velar fricative [ɣ] /haɡe/ > [haɣe] はげ, hage, 'baldness'


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verner%27s_law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_ ... #Weakening

[Philoglossos]

So from pure plosive(psila) Π,Τ,Κ we get 2 further sets of weakened consonants by modulating the breath as Halicarnaseus explicitly tells us('arterias ypichousis to pneumati'):

Π,Τ,K = /p /t /k pure plosive=psila=kakista=worst because no air from the lungs modulating the sounds
Β,Δ,Γ = /β /δ /γ intermediate lenition=mesa
Φ,Θ,Χ = /φ /θ /χ full lenition=dasea=kratista=best because plenty of air from the lungs modulating the sounds
MΠ/ΜΒ, NT/ΝΔ, ΝΚ/ΓΓ; = /b,/d,/g The extra set of boosted(via the explosive nasals) plosives, as in modern English, German, etcetera.

Red=labials
Blue=dentals
Black=velars

If a language contains all 4 sets of these consonants, there is not much other place for them to go to other than drop some of them, or not. Aspirated vs non-aspirated are not distinguished by separate letters in Greek or Latin as the difference between pot and stop is meaningless and certainly does not warrant the introduction of separate letters either in Greek or in Latin and it never has during their entire existence.

We see the exact same Lenition process in Germanic with Verner's law explaining how pater becomes father, /p -->/f, /t -->/δ and not pater with superscript aspirate h to allegedly denote the difference between pot and stop as the Erasmian/Allen's nonsense claim it was in Attic.

We also see the exact same lenition process in Japanese where b weakens to /β and g weakens to /γ:

/b/ > bilabial fricative [β] /abareru/ > [aβaɾeɾɯ] 暴れる, abareru, 'to behave violently'
/ɡ/ > velar fricative [ɣ] /haɡe/ > [haɣe] はげ, hage, 'baldness'


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verner%27s_law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_ ... #Weakening

Hi there, I'm the Philoglossos you engaged with in Luke's comment section - I'm not Luke himself, and happy to prove it to you if you wish. Our argument got very heated, and for my contribution to that I apologize. I'm not particularly interested in doing it all again via text, since it's so easy to devolve into a very unproductive and heated back and forth, but I'd be happy to have an actual voice chat with you on discord or something along those lines if you are interested. I also figure I should leave here this link, since you don't seem to be aware that the biblio forum is still very much up and that the full conversation can be viewed there. Buth and Luke's conversation revolves almost entirely around the maintenance of phonemic vowel length in or after the 2nd century, and Buth otherwise received the pronunciation system rather positively, calling it a 'step in the right direction' and 'a serious endeavor'.

In case you aren't interested in talking to me, I will briefly address the issue of Japanese: your contention is basically the following if I have understood it correctly:

a) No language can develop a voiceless fricative like /f/ or /ɸ/ (i.e. be it bilabial or labiodental) if it doesn't already have a voiced fricative like /v/ or /β/

b) Japanese having /ɸ/ as a phoneme distinct from /b/ and /p/ isn't evidence against this, because /b/ is, as per wikipedia, sometimes realized as a bilabial fricative [β]

There's a few issues with this line of argument though. The first is that I think what you're envisioning as a 'v' sound isn't actually what you hear in Japanese. For instance, here are three native recordings of the particular word cited on wikipedia /abareru/. I think pretty much anyone who speaks a language with both the sound /b/ and the sound /v/ will hear the 'b' in 'abareru' as a 'b', not as a 'v'.

The thing is that IPA has only one symbol, [β], for what are arguably different sounds - the bilabial fricative, and a bilabial approximant, with the latter being anything approaching a 'b' sound where the lips don't completely close, and the former being an actual fricative similar to an English or Greek 'v' sound.

This paper goes into detail on weakening of stops in Japanese and how it fundamentally relates to the amount of time alloted to realizing the consonant.

The next issue is that, as per the paper, the realization of /b/ in Japanese as a 'fricative', or basically anything other than a full stop consonant, is a context dependent alternate realization of 'b', which is a sort of distinction that in your comments here you make out to be negligible, namely when you talk about the distinction between the 'p' in the English words 'pot' and 'stop'. You basically try to make the argument that because this difference isn't percieved by native speakers, and that it's context dependent, that therefore it might as well not exist, which is interesting given that Japanese speakers don't percieve different pronunciations of their 'b' sounds, which are also context dependent.

This becomes obvious when you consider how English words are loaned into Japanese. Take the word 'video'. As you can hear in the native recordings, all four speakers pronounce it with a clearly audible 'b' sound - there is no 'v' sound for them to rely on here to render the English word with. Meanwhile, 'f' is a sound completely available to Japanese speakers, even in contexts where they don't natively have it. For instance, they have no issue pronouncing it in the word 'fairu' from English 'file', even though in native Japanese words, /f/ is never followed by the vowel /a/.

We also know from Portuguese and Spanish transcriptions of Japanese from the 1600's that this 'f' sound has been present for hundreds of years, while as you can hear yourself from the recordings, the weakening of voiced stops in Japanese is much less established.

Hopefully you can see at the very least that I am not being dishonest in my perspective, even if you don't take Japanese to be good evidence against your premise a) (i.e. if you assume that the weakening of voiced stops must have preceded the development of /f/, given that we don't have concrete evidence it didn't).

But if we look at the historical development of Japanese, we do still observe a big problem with your conclusions, which is that the categorization of 'p t k' as 'full plosives', 'v dh gh' as 'intermediate lenition' and 'f th kh' as 'full lenition' doesn't reflect the fact that in Japanese, /f/ developed from what was historically /p/, and [β] when it appears is simply a variant of /b/. This instead points to the way that linguists classify these sounds:

(less lenition < more lenition) p < b < f < v

Lenition is basically when a consonant becomes more vowel-like. Vowels, generally speaking, are sounds made by vibrating the vocal chords, and with no restriction of the air.

p and b fully stop the air, so they are the least sonorous (vowel-like), but of these, b involves a vibration of the vocal chords, making it more sonorous.

f and v restrict the air, creating audible friction, and so they are more sonorous, but of these, v is more sonorous than f, because the vocal chords vibrate for v and not for f.

This is also consistant with what languages tend to do, which is that b generally lenits to v, and p generally lenits to b or to f. Your hierarchy would imply instead that b, which you call 'extra reinforced' should 'lenit' to p, that 'p' should lenit to 'v', and that 'v' should lenit to 'f', but this just isn't what we observe crosslinguistically - shifts like 'v' to 'f' do occur, but they aren't lenition, which we know because they don't happen in the environments where lenition happens. They instead tend to occur word initially or word finally, or just across the whole language, as is happening in modern Dutch, or as happened historically in German.

The point is this: b to v, p to b and p to f are sound shifts that tend to happen in the same sorts of contexts (mainly between vowels), while b to p and v to f happen in different contexts (mainly at the ends/beginnings of words, or with no relationship to phonological context), and p basically never becomes v without an intermediate stage of b first. Your theory doesn't explain these facts.

Finally, there's the issue that even if you reject the example of Japanese after considering all of the facts of its phonology, there are still much less complicated examples like Mauri.

[noemon]

Thank you for taking the time to come in here and for posting the link to the ibiblio forum. I got the link from Luke Ranieri's page where he states that the forum went down and that is why he made copies of the conversation but only for the 2 pages that he found via the Internet Archive.

Second it is quite obvious to me that Philoglossos=Luke Ranieri.

1) "Philoglossos" is an alias Luke actively uses on the internet and his videos.
2) They both claim to speak Japanese and both use it as an argument in their debates and both talk the same subject using the same arguments in the same place.
3) The writing style and arguments are identical. Being an admin/moderator of a forum for about a decade makes one a bit of a specialist in identifying sock-puppets.

So that is way too much coincidence to be coincidental, especially in such a vogue topic and username.

About the topic itself at hand:

What did B sound like in Classical Athens and Rome? Did it sound like a /v or like a /b?

The evidence is clear that it sounded like a v. Why?

1) Bini et vini proves it sounded like a v.
2) It sounded like a v in Phoenician from where it was adopted from.
3) Inscriptions prove it sounded like a v.
4) Ancient grammarians tell us explicitly it sounded like a v and instruct us how to pronounce it correctly using the air from our lungs and the obstruency of our mouths.
5) Modern linguistics prove how harsh plosive sounds like p,t,k(ugly according to the ancients) become soft mild(beautiful according to the ancients) sounds like /β, /δ, /γ via the process of lenition in several languages globally.

This is very conclusive evidence that B=/v.

On the other side we have you, Luke and the Erasmian tradition who merely assert:

B=/b because it is so in modern German and Romance. Full stop. No further argument attached.
Ludicrous claims that follow from your theory:
1) Athenians and Romans could not vocalise but pocalised instead.
2) 3 letters in 2 civilisations spanning over thousands of miles converged to /v at the same time, where /v did not exist but around the year 0, 3 letters were used to vocalise v. This is also quite eye-popping of a statement.
3) Erasmians reconstructed an unattested theoretical language(PIE, proto-Indo-European) and then used this reconstruction to project it to attested Latin and Greek. This is so ridiculous even as a thought process that is quite mind-boggling. Instead of asking Nick's wife about Nick's disposition you imagined his great-grandpa and then assumed that if the imaginary great-grand pa was an asshole then Nick's an asshole too. But Nick left us his diary, his entire life on video and his entire internet & computer history. .ie thousands of inscriptions, grammarians, polytonic system and billions of words in stone and parchment. Instead of looking into Nick's actual diary, video, spouse and friends, you imagined a grand-da instead and then projected that onto Nick with militant assertion. It is beyond belief actually. You have created a purely imaginary version of the most attested literary dialect in written history.
4) You claim what the ancient grammarian considered ugly was 100% the case, while what the ancients grammarians considered beautiful did not even exist.
5) Latins had discovered and vocalised /f but had not yet discovered and could not vocalise /v. This is quite impossible because /v and /f are both lenited forms of /p and the /v is the intermediate lenition. It is basically going from 1st gear to 3rd while skipping 2nd gear which one can do indeed but only after having discovered the 2nd gear. .ie one can skip or drop a phoneme, but only after it has been discovered. Latins did not drop the /v phoneme after discovery, they still got it as do the Greeks, so your claim that they had not discovered it does not stand because you admit they had /p & /f. They had 1st and 3rd gear you say but missed the 2nd gear entirely.
6) You claim that the ancient Athenians adopted new letters to distinguish p from pot with p from stop and that they did the same thing for k as in cot(aspirated) and k as in kappa(non aspirated). And t as in tut(aspirated) and t as in tell(non aspirated). This claim is totally ludicrous and beyond belief. Why only the Athenians would do such a thing with 6 of their letters, 6/9 of their consonants? 6/9 aphona you claim had impossible to distinguish phonetic differences. And why would they only do it for a few decades? Not before and not after the 4th BCE? This is flat-earthism gone insane.

There is in fact no language in the entire planet where people know /p know /f but never knew /v. All the people were this has happened, had /v but dropped it and now only have /p and /f. But there is no language where they discovered /p and /f but failed to discover /v. From a physical mouth/airway standpoint it is not actually possible to go from /p to /f and fail to discover /v on the way to /f. Because as you create stricture of the air in your mouth /v will happen whether the speaker intends it or not. The main difference between p-v-f is merely how much air you allow when vocalising. Example 10% air you get a p, 40% air you get a v and 70-90% air you get an /f. You can't go to 70% without passing from 40% first, if you add a nasal explosion(with an /m or an /n) on the 10% for /p you get a /b.

So not only you have zero evidence for your neo-Erasmian claim, not only you have no argument against actual grammarians & inscriptions but the claim itself relies on such a flimsy basis that it is indeed beyond belief how such claims are still somehow sustained and given air to their sails by people like Luke Ranieri.

Take the word 'video'. As you can hear in the native recordings, all four speakers pronounce it with a clearly audible 'b' sound - there is no 'v' sound for them to rely on here to render the English word with.

That is totally false. Anyone can hear all 4 of them are pronouncing video and not bideo. This line of argument is very poor as is your secondary argument that IPA /β is not accurate enough to describe Japanese /β. It is /β in wiki, well because it is a /β sound. No conspiracy there to prove your claim[that /β does not exist in Japan) wrong. /β does exist in Japan and it is proven both with official links and by your videos.

But if we look at the historical development of Japanese, we do still observe a big problem with your conclusions, which is that the categorization of 'p t k' as 'full plosives', 'v dh gh' as 'intermediate lenition' and 'f th kh' as 'full lenition' doesn't reflect the fact that in Japanese, /f/ developed from what was historically /p/, and [β] when it appears is simply a variant of /b/. This instead points to the way that linguists classify these sounds:

(less lenition < more lenition) p < b < f < v

No.

v is the lenited/weakened form of p and f is the lenited form of v. In the continuum p-v-f. Same applies to t-th-th(/τ-/δ-/θ) and k-gh-ch(/κ-/γ-/χ).

The examples given and the links provided show this to happen in Greek, German and Japanese conclusively.

[Philoglossos]

Hi again! I am happy to go onto a video call with you, screen share, and show you myself logged into my Philoglossos account on YouTube, if you are so certain I am lying lol. Luke and I do both speak Japanese - he was stationed there while serving in the US military, while I have studied it in university and lived there for a little over a year in total. What's so funny is that I can completely see why you might think we're the same person not knowing that he just isn't the sort to use sock puppets and not knowing who I am, but the fact remains that we are two different people, and as I mentioned, this is very easy to prove.

I very deliberately won't discuss any of the Greek or Latin historical evidence here, because I think it's impossible for us to have that conversation now via text in a productive way, and because there are fundamental differences in our opinions of what language is and how it works that must be resolved first. We really will have to start from our respective claims about phonology in general to get anywhere.

In particular, I think we need to start with this issue of p, f, b and v - this is a very interesting disagreement, and if we can resolve it, I think it is the key to moving forwards. In order to resolve this issue, we have to both understand each others' reasons for believing what we believe about these sounds. I think I know why you believe what you do about them, but I am quite possibly mistaken. I do not think you understand my reasons for believing what I believe about these sounds - my assumption is you think my view is driven by ideology or orthodoxy, but once again, I may be completely wrong. So, to resolve this, I will first summarize what I think you believe about p, f, b and v as well as what I believe your reasons to be - not to put words in your mouth or erect a strawman, but so that you can correct me if I do not understand your position. Similarly, I will in my next response summarize my own view, and I hope you will make the effort to understand it from my perspective, even if you don't accept it as true.

1) As you've stated above, you believe that /v/ is softer (more lenited) than /p/, and that /f/ in turn is softer (more lenited) than /v/. You believe that this means that it is impossible for /p/ to develop into /f/ without first developing into /v/, and you believe that the difference between these sounds is primarily the amount of air being expelled - v involves expelling more air than p, and f involves expelling more air than p. Thus, you believe that lenition (softening) is a process whereby more air is expelled while creating the sound. Furthermore, you believe that /b/ is a sound is a combination of a nasal sound /n/ or /m/ with the sound /p/.

2) You believe the above for the following reasons:

a) You believe, for all of the reasons you have given elsewhere, that at the time of the descriptions of π β φ provided to us by Greek grammarians, that they were pronounced as they are today.

b) Ancient grammarians describe β as between π and φ, and you take this as an accurate observation for the sounds /p/ /v/ /f/

c) It makes intuitive sense to you that /p/ should turn into /v/, and then /v/ into /f/

d) It makes intuitive sense to you that the sound /b/ is a combination of /n/ or /m/ plus /p/

So to summarize, as far as I can tell, your position specifically regarding this issue is completely based on what makes intuitive sense to you, and the statements of the ancient grammarians. Once again, I am not trying to put words into your mouth - please correct or elaborate on my understanding of your view if necessary. After that, I will elaborate on my view.

Finally, there's the issue of the Japanese word ビデオ. I hear the initial sound as basically identical to /b/, and quite different from /v/. Both your and my language distinguish the sounds /b/ and /v/ at the beginnings of words, though I will point out, this sound is fairly rare in Greek compared to English, and it alternates with /mb/. My hypothesis is that maybe it is this expectation of a nasal component which affects your perception of the Japanese sound. I'm happy to elaborate more on this when I describe my view of the preceding issue, but fundamentally, /b/ is not a combination of /m/ and /p/ - this is clear, because languages like english fully distinguish /b/, /mb/ and /mp/. For instance, we have words like 'amp' (not pronounced 'amb'), and we distinguish 'ambi' as in 'ambidexterous' from 'abbey', or 'zombie' and 'swampy'. A telltale sign of a Greek accent in English is the inability to distinguish /mb/, /mp/ and /b/.

What /b/ is fundamentally, is the exact same sound as /p/, but with the vocal chords vibrating as the sound is produced. There doesn't need to be a nasal component to it whatsoever.

But to confirm, here's some more examples of this sound in Japanese - I recommend setting the video speed to 0.5x - I will really be surprised if an unbiased listener whose native language distinguishes /b/ and /v/ hears anything but a clear /b/ sound:

Let me put it this way: if you showed these videos to any linguist who has worked on ancient Greek and describes the sound of β as /b/ in the Classical period whether the sound used in the above videos is correct for that sound, I think they'd all say 'yes'. Even if you found an example with more lenition where the sound is more like a bilabial fricative, I think nobody would insist that was categorically wrong for ancient Greek.

[Saeko]

My 2 cents as an unbiased native English speaker.

1) In the videos of Japanese people pronouncing the word "video", I hear "bideo".

2) In English, there should definitely be no nasal component to the sounds /b/ /d/ and /g/ as in the words "big" "dig" and "gig". There are English words with the sound combinations "mb" "md" and "mg" as in "ambient" "circumduct" and "filmgoer", and those sound very different from the aforementioned ones.

3) I do not perceive any audible similarity between "p" and "f" sounds. "f" and "v"? Sure. The difference is only in the voicing. But "p" and "f" or "p" and "v" are as different as sounds can be. I also perceive no similarity at all between "t" sounds (whether aspirated or un-aspirated) and "th" sounds.