Unintended benefits of ancient coin collecting.

I don't think the Greek C is a Roman (Latin) letter. It is a lunar sigma, the letter written Σ in Hellenistic times and C in the late Roman and Byzantine times (this is why it is written C in Cyrillic alphabet). Same for E which became Є, or Ω which became Ѡ. It is called lunar script.
In Aristophanes, bleating sheep say Βηη. This shows that in 4th c. BC Athens, the B (beta) was pronounced B and not V like today. In modern Greek Βηη would sound "vii". This is not what sheep say, they say Bää. So we can say that in the 4th c. BC B was pronounced B and η was pronounced ä.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

I agree on the B, but I don't think we can make any assumption on the η. In English we say "baa", but Russian sheep say Б-е-е-е. In fact, it seems that only English speaking sheep say "baa." Asiatic sheep use "m" instead of "b", so European and Asian sheep probably can't understand each other.

Who knew what ancient Greek sheep sounded like.

 

Without a doubt the best and most unexpected bonus of this hobby has been the friends I've made. I don't maintain a ton of friendships yet some of my favorite friends-- ones I talk to most often (by talk I mean type )-- are people I've met as a result of collecting ancient coins.

 

Well, in Latin script the Greek η becomes Latin E (not A, not I). The Greek Νίκη becomes in Latin NICE. How could we imagine a pronunciation other than "nikay"? But it is true that colloquial Latin (and Greek) evolved much in the late period (4th - 5th c. AD).

 

Actually, thinking about this a bit more - I believe it's a mistake to believe that Greek pronunciation back then was uniform at all. Given the relative linguistic isolation, there must have been considerable differences from place to place. I would expect this to be especially true for vowels.

Even in terms of B, the pronunciation may not have been uniform. It may have been pronounced "B" in 4th century Athens and "V" in 4th century elsewhere, and eventually the latter became prevalent.

BUT, in complete honesty and in line with the original post, I wasn't aware there was a shift in the B until I started collecting ancient coins.

 

Thank you for a great and interesting post @Jay GT4

• Connecting and viewing the coins of a lot of awesome ancient coin collectors
• Inspiration to create ancient coin graphics and posters
• Inspiration to expand my collections
• Connecting with other Biblical collectors (I echo many of the great points made by @philologus_1 )
• An interest in collecting historic French coins and military exonumia

 

Sorry, I have more:

• I’ve acquired a love of Marianne of France (Symbol of liberty)
• I can totally identify with @Roman Collector ’s excellent Faustina collection

 

I agree with the attic pronunciation of eta at that time. Unfortunatley, my professor of Greek did not.

 

The main side effect to me, after the obvious stated above, and it's a side effect of CT rather than coin collecting, is that it has dramatically improved my english

Q

 

About the pronunciation, nobody can say which was the real one, because also when latin was a living spoken language it changed in the times: Cicero’s Latin was very different from the language spoken by the kings of Rome.
Then language evolved; maybe in 45 BC CAESAR was pronounced KESAR, or KAESAR or TCHESAR (E is always like in pet, however) in the different parts of the empire, and simply each name or term’s pronounciation evolved together with the language spoken there.

 

It is like what is happening right now to English, which is spoken everywhere in the world: same writing and completely different pronounciations, often uncomprehensible for people coming from elsewhere.
I add this: as an Italian native speaker, I can easily read written Romanian (both languages are Latin dialects) but I can’t understand a single spoken word.