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

western european e: , 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.