On 01/12/2010 11:31, Lars Finsen wrote:
> Den 1. des. 2010 kl. 09.03 skrev R A Brown:
>
[snip]
>
> This implies, I guess, that the Homeric texts known and
> used by the Athenians were not in their own version of
> the alphabet, but in that Ionian one. After all, Homer
> was Ionian. If the Athenians had had a distinct letter
> for "aitch", they could have dragged that along, but
> apparently it (the "heta") was identical in form to the
> Ionian "eta".

Before the Athenians adopted the Ionian alphabet it did 
indeed have "heta" which, as far as the character goes (not 
the value) was the same as "eta."  During the change over, 
as the Ionian gradually replaced local form, we do 
occasionally find inscriptions in which _H_ is used with 
both values.

What I meant is that by the Alexandrian period, the Athenian 
Homeric canon had become the accepted one among the Greeks.

> This explains why the capital eta looks so much like an
> H. Some of the colonies in Italy were ionian, but not
> all. Hades in the pre-403 Athenian script would look like
> Ηαδες, I guess - no letter for long e (and no accents).

Yep.
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On 01/12/2010 12:17, Ph.D. wrote:
 > I don't mean to be critical, but shouldn't this be "canon"?

Yes, it should! Thanks.
---------------------------------------------------

On 01/12/2010 15:52, J. 'Mach' Wust wrote:
 > On Wed, 1 Dec 2010 01:53:59 -0000,
 > Charlie<[log in to unmask]>  wrote:
[snip]
 >> Is there no correlation between the Hebrew scriptures
 >> and the Aramaic/Hebrew alphabets, the Zend-avesta and
 >> the Pahlavi script, the Vedas and the Devanagari
 >> alphabet?
 >
 > Not really. In ancient times, much of the Hebrew
 > scriptures were originally written in the Old Hebrew
 > script, but later on in an Aramaic-based script, but that
 > script did not remain plain Aramaic, but changed into
 > what is now the "modern" Hebrew script.

Humph! This looks to me a bit like bending facts to fit a 
theory.  Of course the earliest Hebrew scriptures were 
written in the Old Hebrew alphabet (very similar to the 
Phoenician); later writings were in Aramaic. But in the 
post-exilic period the scriptures came to be compiled and 
standardized and written in the "square Hebrew" characters 
that the Jews have been using for more some two and half 
millennia now. In the minds of the Masoretes and others 
there was certainly a correlation between script and 
scriptures.  Good grief! The Kabbalah is developed largely 
from this correlation.

Lars alludes to the fact that Homer was originally written 
in local scripts and, indeed, almost certainly had variant 
forms of text (In the 19th century some scholars attempted 
to retrieve the "original" together with old letter _vau_). 
But eventually, because of the pre-eminence of Athens the 
Athenian canon, written in the Ionian alphabet, became the 
recognized "authorized version." It was that version that 
the Alexandrians preserved and for which they developed 
various diacritics so that:
- Homer could be read correctly;
- the _script_ of the text could be preserved in the 
authorized form.

[snip]
 >
 > Of course, alphabets were adapted to other languages in
 > Ancient times, but they tended to change into new scripts
 > in the process of adaption. I guess the reason for that
 > was that there were no Scriptures that would conserve the
 > script.

You do NOT need scriptures to conserve a script! It is well 
known that Emperor Claudius added three extra letters to the 
Roman alphabets; and inscriptions can be found with them on. 
But these letters did not survive his reign - not because of 
any scriptures (and certainly the Latin scriptures can't be 
blamed for it!!). I guess the reason they were dropped was 
good ol' plain conservatism.

-- 
Ray
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