(Magica de) Spelled the wrong way

[Kriton Kyrimis]

MICHIEL:

> There's another 'Greek' word on the wall that
> doesn't make any sense to me.

Why, it's obviously "Dfeoo", which means exactly the same thing in
English, as it does in Greek. ;-)

> It's a bit of a pity that Rosa, for all his research, let slip this little
> mistake into his story.

Last time this cropped up, Don said that he did research this!

> But then, how many people can read Greek, so that
> they would notice?

A lot more than the people who would notice the other obscure details
that Don adds in his stories! Greek, after all, is not taught only in
Greek schools, and even the passing acquaintance with the Greek alphabet,
obtained through math, is often enough to enable one to read Greek names.

> And then, there's a sufficient number of Greek-reading
> people on this list to have maybe already mentioned it. (Does this sentence
> make any sense?)

One of them did, and it does. :-)

> I don't know how Circe is pronounced in English and French,

My guess would be "Sirse", just like Don spelled it in Greek. This
spelling sounds like what you'd get if you'd ask a Greek on the phone
how to spell "Sirse" in Greek; they would not recognize the name,
and they would therefore come up with a phonetic transcription, most
probably sigma-iota-rho-sigma-epsilon. The upsilon in Don's version is
an interesting touch, though. A modern Greek would still pronounce that
name as "Sirse", but an ancient Greek would pronounce it as "Soorse"!

> CIRCE is just the
> Roman transcription (switch from one alphabeth to the other) of Greek
> KIPKH.

Actually, it might be a transcription of the Greek name KIPKE, or even
KIRKE.  Originally, eta was a consonant in Greek, similar to the one in
the Roman alphabet, and epsilon was used to represent both a short and
a long e sound.  As the h sound began to fall in disuse, eta began to
be reused as a vowel, representing a long e sound. To complicate matters
further, the long e sound, was then turned into a short i sound, which is
why modern Greeks pronounce KIPKH as "Kirki". As for rho, it originally
looked more like R, with the slanted "leg" not going all the way down. The
alphabet of Chalkis, which, I understand, was the basis for the Roman
alphabet, used this version. In the Roman alphabet the slanting leg was
extended all the way down, while in the Greek alphabet it was chopped off.

The inscription in the treasury of Croesus would, quite likely, say
"KIPKE" instead of "KIPKH", as Midas lived around 700BC, and the change
from E to H began around 500 BC.

[An interesting detail for those who have had to struggle with the
aspiration marks in classical Greek: although it doesn't look like it,
the two aspiration marks are supposed to be the right (|_) and left (_|)
halves of the abolished H consonant!]

	Kriton	(e-mail: kyrimis at cti.gr)
	      	(WWW:    http://dias.cti.gr/~kyrimis)
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