What does META stand for in Thracian diobol?

Another interesting avenue is the Semitic roots for many Greek words and the changeovers that occur there. Such changeovers are at the heart of the Asalluhi to Acheloios argument in Potamikon (the s-k changeover is common). I was surprised at how many Greek words have a Semitic origin.

 

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I use "dwarves" when writing, as I use "scarves," "elves," "shelves," and so on.

Apparently, one of the prominent differences between the various dialects in middle English was a F/V substitution, hence we have both fox and vixen in modern English (as just one example).

 

How often do you write about dwarves and elves?

 

Your linguistic explanations are all very interesting, but the "T" is not a "T" it is an archaic form of sigma - turn it 90º counter-clockwise - and notice that the top bar of the "T" often has small "legs" parallel to the upright at the ends of the bar. In that orientqtion, it's easier to see how it could be a form of sigma

 

Here's my AE.


Thrace, Mesembria AE17
Thrace, Mesembria. Circa 4th-3rd Century BC. Æ 17mm (3.85 gm). Crested Corinthian helmet facing / META in spiked wheel.

 

Yes, Ed Snible pointed that out, and indeed I find that explanation persuasive. Maybe all those descriptions with "M-E-T-A in wheel" need rewriting?

 

FYI => I revised my post on page 1 (I added my cool David Sear authentication)

... just sayin'

 

Steve, can you turn the camera/phone sideways and photograph/post the entire "historical note" Sear provides? It looks really helpful. At the end Sear mentions that the "T" is a double sigma, so that seals (sears?) it.

 

Always keep 'em wanting more ...

 

Those that may be bothered by the rotation of the letter may want to look at some other old letter forms. This is a Sybaris with rotated sigma that reads right to left. It is not VM.

 

Hu...neat thread.

So what drives this Grimm's law? Are people shifting from things that are harder to say to things that are easier to say? By harder I mean more difficult/energetically costly for the humans produce because of anatomy? Is language just drifting down the path of least resistance?

 

Parakalow!

 

Gesundheit!

 

I'm not sure how to explain what "drives" Grimm's law. I've always taught it simply as a means of describing the sound correspondences between Indo-European and the specific Germanic subfamily of Indo-European. I don't think principle of least effort is adequate to describe the sound changes. There are three prongs of Grimm's law; the last one escapes me now. But the first two are:

1. Indo-European voiceless stops become Germanic voiceless fricatives. Cardiac>Heart
2. Indo-European voiced stops become Germanic voiceless stops. Dent>Tooth
3. I think the third prong deals with voiced aspirated stops becoming voiced stops, losing their aspiration in Germanic. But again, I'm working from memory over dinner.

So I don't think these articulations are becoming "easier"; indeed, though it seems counterintuitive, I think a general linguistic principle is that voiced sounds are easier to make than voiceless ones. It's why we tend to voice consonants in little words such as "of" and "the."

So for me, Grimm's Law describes things. But I'm not good enough a linguist to know how or why these changes developed in Germanic. But they are quite systematic. There are some notable exceptions, but these are often explained by Verner's law.

 

Another reason why it might be inadequate to explain Grimm's law sound changes by means of the principle of least effort is that the non-Germanic Indo-European forms survive just fine. We still have a cardiac and heart. Dental and tooth. Paternal and father. Podiatrist and foot. Fraternal and brother. If Grimm's law were a function of the principle of least effort, you might expect these non-Germanic Indo-European forms to fade away. But obviously they don't. For language geeks enjoying this sort of thing, I will post my Grimm's law worksheet when I get back to my materials. It's a fun little puzzle you can work to generate the Law.

I know we are pretty far afield from coinage; sorry for this linguistic digression. But not that sorry. The more comfortable we are with language and linguistics, I think the better we can understand ancient coinage, through Grimm's Law may not be especially relevant, I'll admit

 

Grimms's law (yes this is the same Grimm as in the chronicler of many fairy tales), describes how sounds have changed and not why. We may never know why these sounds in particular changed across languages and over time, but language change is fairly constant within a language. As a friend of mine said one day "If a language does not change...it dies". Indeed, language death has occurred many times over the ages.

In fact, if you look closely at English you may notice some of the changes that have occurred in just the last few decades. There are many changes that came with the invention of the internet, and there are other changes in usage. If repeated enough, these changes will become part of the language. For example, did you notice that years ago in the early days of the internet, the term E-mail was exclusively used as a noun? How about 'impact'? Other times grammatical distinctions are being dropped. For example, have you ever gone to a grocery store manager to get them to change their sign from 'Eight items or less" to "Eight items or fewer"? How many people care that 'items' are by definition countable nouns and that countable nouns must be modified by 'fewer' and not 'less'. Have you ever used 'they' as a singular in order to avoid the choice between he or she?

Languages change as people speak them over time. Did you wonder why there are several words for 'pig' including swine and Pork? When French began infiltrating the English language after 1066 the peasants spoke what we now call late Anglo-Saxon, a language of the West Germanic branch of the indo-european language family. The peasants raised swine, but the ruling class were French and so they ate porc.

Sometimes words pop into existence with no know etymological root. However, sometimes we use loan words. For example, did you know that glamour and grammar come from the same greek root?

Now if you have read this and are still interested you might want to look up the great vowel shift.


Now here is a parting gift of sorts, a heteronym "we must polish the Polish furniture"

 

well, i don't really understand it...but it's very interesting stuff.

has this happened yet?

 

So here's that Grimm's Law exercise I promised. I'll post the answer key tomorrow. I adapted it from an old exercise I found.

 

@Gavin Richardson

That is an excellent exercise. Thanks for posting it here.

 

...and here's the answer key. This exercise does a pretty good job of prompting students to generate the first two prongs of Grimm's Law. Learning by doing. Demonstrating the third prong is not so easy.

1. IE voiceless stops became Germanic voiceless fricatives. Ex. [p] > [f]
2. IE voiced stops became Germanic voiceless stops. Ex. [d] > [t]
3. IE voiced aspirated stops became Germanic voiced stops. Ex. [gh] > [g]

I once asked a colleague why we don't have a good word pair to illustrate #3. His response:

“The problem, of course, is that IE voiced aspirated stops really lost their aspiration in Latin and Greek, too, just like in German (or they lost the stop and kept the aspiration, as in hortus from *gher-). So it’s going to be very difficult to find a language that retained the voiced aspirated stop AND loaned a word to English that you can pair up with a Germanic word from the same root, except for loans directly from Hindi:

Bhang: Bong
Dharma: Dharma
Dinghy : Dinghy

With the first, they can actually see the difference, but with all three, you’ll just have to assure students that the <h> is actually aspirated in the Hindi but not in the English.”