Greek Alphabet - A New Insight

alphabet let go of all you think you know about the ancient greek alphabet, even if you’re a world famous professor of greek at the world’s best ever university, even if you’ve been one for ever such eons – put it aside and remind yourself that it is almost entirely theory, hypothesis and guesswork, not fact, and mostly formed long before the sophisticated linguistic and hermeneutic and historical analytical techniques of the 20th century, inadequate as they still are, were in use; and it has not yet begun to respond to the new insights into language, spelling and alphabet changes derivable, but not yet derived from the application of those techniques. it’s way past time we started to examine all the other hypotheses that can reasonably be built upon the evidence. current hypotheses are the result of comparative studies of the shapes of letters in alphabets in use in different cultures throughout history. it’s still a valuable study but one which has been shaped, or rather misshapen by the unsupported assumptions upon which it is built. one assumption is that mesopotamia was the only significant centre of diffusion of western literacy, and another is that literacy was first brought to britain and ireland by the romans. the most misleading is that all language evolution is dendriform, tree-shaped, with well-defined languages dividing unaided in a regular way into ‘branches and sub-branches with variations regarded as deviations. although this model has long been recognised to be inappropriate, with other models dealing more realistically with the data, it is still in use in academic circles because it is the one that supports the theoretical PIE (proto-indo-european language), which is not supported by the more realistic models. but look what happens if you replace these assumptions with another three, arrived at by sifting the evidence and looking at it from other angles: that there were several centres of diffusion and britain was one of the biggest, with ancient latin derived in the main from an even more ancient language which was recognisably proto-english; that the greek alphabet is derived from the western european one now mis-named ‘roman’, and is a proof that this alphabet was in use long before the roman expansion, that colonisation, intermarriage, and military service far from home with retirement in foreign lands , not natural diffusion, cause some of the most dramatic instances of language change, with schooling and foreign marriage resulting in language change through vocabulary impoverishment and erroneous learning. ‘ consider the word athen, written α’θην in hellenic.

look at my scrawl above. my hypothesis is that the current spelling in the greek alphabet of the stem athen- derived from just such a scrawl, in the alphabet now in use in britain and elsewhere. look first at the alpha. just for fun, imagine an illiterate ancient athenian begging to be taught by a literate person how to write athen-, the name of this new colony in what is

now called hellas. the literate proudly scrawls the above and the illiterate seizes upon it with fanatical ardour. let’s analyse it.

you will see that it looks pretty much like a western european a: as if either a scholar has learnt it not quite correctly or has attempted to streamline it into one smooth stroke. it could well be the former, because the others had to have been about as crudely formed as mine are as you shall see.

next comes an apostrophe: yep, that’s sure what that is. now in our times, an apostrophe signals something missing at the point of insertion, and i want to suggest that this was so back then. i suggest that what was missing was the letters representing th, because that sound is notorious for not being pronounced, or for being mispronounced as t or s or d or z and so is frequently dropped out or glottal-stopped out of first speech and later spelling.

and besides, the next letter:

western european e:

is clearly not a th but an ill-formed e, like the modern

, which it would be if the apostrophe stood for an omitted ‘th’ ,

and to clinch it the following letter: is an n: not a long e as it later came to be as a result of error, resulting from confusion over the meaning of the apostrophe.

that leaves us to conjecture that the ν, must be a scrawled z, not an n, and entered the hellenic alphabet as a nu by error originating from this spelling. just to finish off, let the scrawly literate be made to rewrite the word neatly underneath the

disgraceful display shown above and here are the two together to compare. in the ‘corrected’ example, i’ve inserted a tiny th under the apostrophe to show where it was

omitted:

there now, isn’t that spooky, like going back into the ancient past and meeting your uncle joe and all the gang, eh. ancient english. mwahahaha! copyright 2007 vyvyan ogma wyverne but you can do what you like with it, as long as you include this copyright notice.