4 ms·
Your presence inspired me to try to look up what the circumflex on "abzû" is supposed to signify. As best I can tell, it's a marker of vowel length. I wonder h
by thaumasiotes 2y ago
Your presence inspired me to try to look up what the circumflex on "abzû" is supposed to signify. As best I can tell, it's a marker of vowel length.
I wonder how that came to be used. It's a traditional way to distinguish eta and omega in transliteration from Greek, but it's not at all a traditional way to mark long vowels in general.
(I see that wikipedia says this about Akkadian:
> Long vowels are transliterated with a macron (ā, ē, ī, ū) or a circumflex (â, ê, î, û), the latter being used for long vowels arising from the contraction of vowels in hiatus.
But it seems odd for an independent root to contain a contracted double vowel. And the page "Abzu" has the circumflex on the Sumerian transliteration too.)
- stavros 2y ago"Abzu" is also the Greek onomatopoeia for a sneeze.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoI was highly amused to learn that the ancient Greek verb for spitting is πτύω. (Compare English "ptooey".)
- stavros 2y agoYeah, and the modern is much the same ("φτύνω"). I'm sure it's onomatopoeic, and it's an amusing word.
- jorvi 2y agoIt's funny how I can sort-of read the Dutch word in "τύν": spit "tuf" and spitting "tuffen". I can't find the etymology of it so it might be a false cognate If it isn't a false cognate, I wonder what the function of "φ" and "ω" are..
- stavros 2y agoIt is a false cognafe, it's not pronounced "oo", but "ee". It's just onomatopoeia, that's why it's so similar.
- jorvi 2y agoWe pronounce it t-uh-f, as in "tough" without the o.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoNote that ν is an N, not a V. I think the standard transliteration of φτύνω from modern Greek would be "ftino". (Note also that "tough" is pronounced t-uh-f /tʌf/, with nothing O-like anywhere in it.)
- jorvi 2y agoI wonder if that's because of the two different ways you can spit: without windup ("tuf" sound) and with windup / breathing in ("hff-tuf" sound).
- thaumasiotes 2y agoMandarin is 吐 /tʰu/.
- pandemic_region 2y agoDoes the popular 'hawk' prefix for this also originate from ancient Greek ?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mananaysiempre 2y agoSeems to be an older convention in linguistics. Romanizations of Japanese also switched from circumflexes (Tôkyô) to macrons (Tōkyō) at some point in time fairly long ago—I think the English-language Japanese journal I saw using that convention systematically was from the late 1950s, and its recent issues definitely don’t use it. Perhaps a circumflex was easier to typeset, like with logicians switching from Ā to ¬A and the Chomskyan school in linguistics switching from X-bar and X-double-bar to X' and XP?