Talk:Ancient Greek phonology/Archive 2

message: Please use this section only for things that we need to look up, that might be relevant to this article +MATIA  ☎ 20:34, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  articles that we need to check 

message: Congratulations to Lukas and anyone else involved in the current draft, which is a vast improvement. Now that we've got the history so clearly stated I withdraw my previous suggestion that the references to Erasmus should be removed. --rossb 11:26, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Ditto!  Thanks for the excellent work. --Macrakis 14:59, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: about WP:NPOV: This article name used to be Ancient Greek pronunciation. While I don't exactly understand the difference between phonology and phonetics, I don't think it's a good idea to move this article around renaming it (one can check the history for the various title changes). WP:NPOV is the policy we should comply with, at all events. The (modern) reconstructed system, Allen's Vox Graeca, the (original) erasmian system, Dionysious Thrax's grammar (see external link), the (reuchlinian) traditional system, Caragounis position and User:Thrax's contributions are 7 different things, yet most of them are related to the article. My suggestions are to improve the article instead of renaming it, engaging edit wars and splitting it. Let's get this article into a higher quality level with the help of all interested parties. Thanks for reading this and good luck to everyone. (I'll probably take a wikibreak one of these days) +MATIA  ☎ 12:44, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

text: Nope. It is good but it has problems. Different problems than those it had one day before, but problems. Check the Eleftheroudakis article and my line about the 7 different things. +MATIA  ☎ 17:29, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Your line about the 7 vowels comes from Dionysios Thrax paragraph 6. --Thrax 17:31, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I was not talking about 7 vowels, but about those 7 things: "The (modern) reconstructed system, Allen's Vox Graeca, the (original) erasmian system, Dionysious Thrax's grammar (see external link), the (reuchlinian) traditional system, Caragounis position and User:Thrax's contributions are 7 different things, yet most of them are related to the article" +MATIA  ☎ 18:29, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

text: Yes, the article still has problems, it needs improvement. Andreas 01:17, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  A vast improvement 

message: According to Hebrew scholarship the Proto-Semitic letters b, p, d, t, g, k all became fricatives (like in modern Greek) after vowels in Hebrew and Aramaic based on evidence from Ancient Greek translations (ie. The Septuagint's translation of the Hebrew bible and the Josephus Greek translation of his original writings from Aramaic into Greek). Futhermore Proto-Semitic also had a fricative g (like Gamma) as well a fricative h which both survive in Arabic and which are known to have existed in spoken Biblical Hebrew. The Proto-Semitic fricative g did not survive in the written Hebrew language but was still used in the spoken language in Hellenistic times and this resulted in the Septuagint transcribing the Hebrew name 'Amorah (aMRH) as the correct Proto-Semitic name Gomorra. , , . Now since the Septuagint was translated by 72 Hebrew scholars not Greeks it is clear that if Gamma was pronounced as a hard G in 280 BC when the translation was made these 72 Hebrew scholars would have never identified it with Proto-Semitic fricative g which was no longer written as anything more than an aspiration mark (if such things existed in Hellenistic Hebrew). If Gamma was not a pure fricative in 280 BC these 72 Hebrew scholars would not have learned it as such and they would have not written Gomorra but would have used an aspiration mark or nothing at all.  From Herodotus it is clear that these 72 Hebrew scholars would have learned Greek as children rather than as adults thus assuming that their average age was 60 (they are described as elders after all) the Greek that they learned would have dated from the time that Alexander conquered Palestine in 330 BC which means that modern Greek gamma must have been fully developed in this time in order for all of these 72 Hebrew scholars to have recognised it as such in their transcription. Furthermore as has already been stated Hebrew b, p, d, t, g, k were all fricatives in Hellenistic times corresponding to the modern pronunciation of β, φ, δ, θ, γ, χ in Biblical Greek. If gamma was a fully developed ficative in this time then β, φ, δ, θ, γ, χ must be as well. Since German scholars claim that it took at least 400 years for the first phase of the changes of proto-Germanic p, t, k into f, th, h to have been completed it is natural to assume that if any changes in the sound of these Greek consonants took place it must have taken an equal amount of time or longer since we are not only talking about p, t, k but b, d, g as well. This places the beginning of any change in 730 BC or earlier and it is obvious that by 530 BC at the time of Piseistratus reforms more than half the Greek population would have been using modern pronouncation, and this and more is shown by Caragounis. Since this is the case it is clear that the reconstructed pronunciation has ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE from inscriptions on which to found its claims on, since all the inscriptions which are significant to this issue MUST be interpreted as referring to modern Greek pronunciation which was by 530 or earlier the majority pronunciation, or as inconclusive. Latin the only other guide clearly shows that the dasea were fricatives. On top of this since we know know that 100% of the Greek population and the Hebrews must have pronounced delta as a fricative since 330 BC it is clear that the account of Dionysius Thorax referring to the pronouncation of Zeta referrs to an s superposed with fricative modern Greek delta which is Z and nothing else. Since this is the ONLY evidence on which the claim of the reconstructed pronunciation of zeta as zd or dz comes from the reconstructed pronunciation of zeta is clearly a lie. It is an academic fraud created for ethno-political ends in the face of overwhelming evidence which shows that proto-Semitic and Hebrew zayin was always z and that this must also have been so when the Greeks adopted the same script the Hebrews used and was clearly the case in Hellenistic times. In fact since there is no evidence whatsoever to show that β, φ, δ, θ, γ, χ were anything but fricatives, and that ζ was anything but z during the whole period of recorded Greek why should the teaching of the reconstructed pronunciation be perused any further. It is a fraud and everybody that has any sense outside of the bigoted linguistics community knows it. --Thrax 17:01, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thrax, puh-lease, is it really necessary for you to bloat the talk pages with this "original research"? I don't think this is the right place for you to develop your private theories. Put it on the web somewhere. I know you have a website for that type of stuff. Or put it on Usenet if you must, as you used to do. Lukas 18:04, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hebrew scholarship is against the reconstructed pronunciation 

message: I'm glad my recent stab at the history-of-reconstruction section has met with some approval. It definitely needs some consolidation and streamlining later. Now, before we go on dealing with the rest of the article, I suggest we consider again the position of this article within the whole complex of the Greek-related articles. At the moment, we have: 
*Greek Language, which contains a sketch of the phonology of Modern Greek, and cross-references to this article and to:
**History of Greek. This, in turn, points towards the period-specific pages: 
***Ancient Greek,
***Attic Greek,
***Koine Greek,
***Medieval Greek,
***Modern Greek.
Of the latter, both Ancient Greek and Koine Greek contain very decent phonological sketches of the respective systems. The one on Ancient Greek refers to Allen as its main source, and contains a well-placed  note in the text saying (roughly) that this is a reconstruction which has been debated but is now consensus among linguists. The one on Koine Greek contains a subsection summing up the sound changes linking the classical to the post-classical system. Neither of the two articles currently contains a link to ours, as far as I see. Both phonological sketches are well written and linguistically sound. The only addition that one might want to make is to be more explicit about which letters correspond to which of the sounds (that might not be obvious to the non-expert reader.)
Now, what exactly do we want to achieve with our article here? I tend to think the whole first half is going to be pretty much superfluous once the various articles are properly linked up among each other. What I think we could do here is twofold: (a) for the reader who has seen the note about reconstruction consensus at Ancient Greek and is skeptical about that, or wants to know more, we can provide a list of the types of arguments and evidence (not every single argument itself) that have been used in the reconstruction debate, on both sides. We could synthesise much of that from the "arguments" lists already present and from the present history section (helping to streamline that down a bit too). (b) we can provide the history of how the reconstruction consensus emerged, as it's now attempted. 
What do you guys think?Lukas 18:00, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Why (a) or (b)? +MATIA  ☎ 18:26, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: By "twofold" I rather meant to imply "(a) and (b)" :-)  Lukas 18:32, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Oh :) Perhaps (b) and then (a). I've found Age of Erasmus by P. S. Allen, which has some info about Erasmus and Reuchlin. +MATIA  ☎ 18:49, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

text:  Roman Pronunciation of Latin, Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin (few info about greek pronunciation). +MATIA  ☎ 19:26, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

text:  itacism, iotacism, etacism (are these from Webster?), iotacism, etacism, Betacism? +MATIA  ☎ 19:44, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

text:  Pronunciation of Greek (also Reuchlin, Erasmus etc this may have something to do with the history of an english university). +MATIA  ☎ 19:54, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

text: Okay, I've been "bold in editing" and made a stub for a "types-of-evidence" section. I've tried to give it a systematic structure, not by "pro" and "contra", but by domains of data. It needs filling in, and the other section then can take a bit of thinning out. And both, as +MATIA suggests, may need to be fleshed out with references. Lukas 19:47, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

text: How about "Reconstruction of Ancient Greek Pronunciation"? Lukas 19:47, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  While the pronunciation was in the original title, we could work on the article (the (a) and (b) Lukas previously mentioned etc) and then check it again. Perhaps the word Reconstruction in the title (and the same for phonology, phonetics, pronunciation) makes it less general than the content. +MATIA  ☎ 19:54, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  How to go on 

message: Does anyone support the totallydisputed tag? If so state, briefly the reasons. My personal opinion is that the article is evolving pretty good after each edit. +MATIA  ☎ 20:02, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The article is a POV rant in favour of the reconstructed pronunciation using invalid evidence and dubious interpretations and excluding all the evidence that does not agree with it. Until all the evidence opposing the reconstructed pronunciation is included the tags should stay. --Thrax 20:10, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd readily agree if we also went back to the old "arguments for the traditional pronunciation" list that got thrown out yesterday, and see how much of that we can again integrate into the new "types of evidence" list, along with the material from the "arguments" list that's now at the end of the article. Some of that stuff is currently in the article anyway, but probably not completely. --Lukas 20:48, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

text: Just the question I wanted to raise myself. Is it okay if I have changed to "ActiveDiscuss", or maybe it was premature to do that without asking first? Please revert if that was against Wikiquette. (But I do think Thrax' isolated position shouldn't justify the "totallydisputed" tag to remain there forever.) Lukas 20:22, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

text: No it is not. The article is still a one sided POV rant --Thrax 20:27, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

text: There was no consensus. Consensus means the agreement of EVERYONE not the agreement of the majority. That's why judges say in court, if there is no consensus then I can accept a majority verdict from the jury. Consensus means 100% total agreement. --Thrax 20:58, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that the "ActiveDiscuss" is the proper label (it's nicer, it points here and it "guarantees" the evolution of the article - somehow like the POV tag). My suggestion to you Thrax would be to work with other editors for the improvment of the article (notice the changes Lukas implemented, I think you'll agree that they are pretty good). Wikipedia:Consensus and WP:NPOV are two good articles, that I think everyone will find interesting. +MATIA  ☎ 21:09, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  about the tags 

message: The systematicity of sound-symbol relationships seems like a logical assumption to make but I do not believe that it actually occurred to the largest degree possible in the case of Greek. Indeed, the older the alphabet, the greater the systematicity and the better the chances to find a one to one correspondence between letter and sound, one would think. But, the attic alphabet is older than the ionic alphabet by which it was replaced. Yet in the Attic alphabet, the letter E represented the sounds later represented by E, H and spurious EI (epsilon, eta and EI resulting from contraction or compensatory lengthening). These were three distinct sounds at all relevant times and not even allophones of each other in attic Greek, differing in both length and height. Their only similarity is the fact that they are all front vowels. Similarly, in the attic alphabet, O stood for Omicron, Omega and spurious OY. So the relation was one to many. Finally, the fact that there are letters like ksi and psi (and zeta?) representing two consonants in succession shows that the relation was also many to one. Therefore, I do not see any huge systematicity here.Yannos 06:36, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: You're right, as it stands it's oversimplifying. Needs some re-formulation to avoid misunderstandings. The point to make is that almost everybody since Erasmus seems to have agreed that things like the multiplicity of [i]-letters on the one hand, and the multiplicity of phonetically widely dissimilar functions of <υ> on the other, would have been dysfunctional and could not easily have emerged in spelling on the basis of the Modern Greek phonological system alone. I think it's clear that the rule "1 sound : 1 symbol" is the idealised principle behind the creation of the alphabet, but we need a better formulation for what kinds of deviations from that principle are historically plausible and which aren't. The point is about the "systematicity", not about being exceptionless. --Lukas 07:57, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Could it be that Attic was defective because Phoenician was not the ideal alphabet for Greek, with the vowel letters developing from consonants that would have been dropped in Greek pronunciation (much as Arabic h, hamza, and 'ayn are in RP), but that it was made more systematic through a guiding principal of a one-to-one correspondance? Any evidence that something like this occurred? kwami 11:01, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, definitely, they started out with a minimal vowel-symbol inventory. The later introduction of <Ω> and vocalic <Η> can certainly be seen as a move in that direction. It's a bit more tricky for the innovation of the bi-phonemic signs <Ξ> and <Ψ>, because they wouldn't have been needed on purely phonological grounds. I think one hypothesis is that they were introduced for phonotactic reasons. /ks/ and /ps/ were the only consonant clusters that could occur at the ends of words (as in the name of our friend, Θραξ), so perhaps that's why Greeks felt they were somehow a unit. But that's just my speculation. As for the "double" value of <Z>, that really seems to be one of the unsolved problems. --Lukas 11:14, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

text: When the Athenians switched from the Attic to the Ionian script several new letters such as eta, omega were added. Eta and Omega were not originally vowels but were compensatory marks associated with the letters epsilon and omicron. Finally when aspiration became redundant in Ionia they became associated with long vowels. Thus, in Attic inscriptions from the early 5th century B.C. on (long) Ε occurs as ΕΙ and later as Η, while (long) Ο occurs as OU and later as Ω. The Greek letter ksi derives directly from the Phoenician symbol for Samesh, the letter psi is the same shape as the Proto-Sinaitic symbol for tsade (whereas san derives from the shape of the Phoenician symbol for tsade and this s sound is what tsade is transcribed into Greek as from Biblical Hebrew), and the letter zeta was always a single sound since its symbol derives from the Phoenician and Proto-Sinaitic symbol for Zayin and this is the only Hebrew symbol that is transcribed as z in Greek (and never as sd, zd, ds or dz or anything similar). --Thrax 17:02, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

text: Sorry, but Thrax has got it wrong yet again. The stuff about E and O is just muddled, while metrical considerations make it clear that there was something special about Zeta (it's treated as a double consonant). --rossb 18:23, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Absolute nonsense. The stuff about E and O is what the inscriptional record proves actually happened (see Caragounis), and there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to show that zeta was anything but a pure fricative z. It was represented by a single symbol for Z (and only z) in Linear-B and not two symbols or an allophone. It was z in proto-Semitic which is the symbol zayin in all Semitic scripts which transliterates into zeta in Greek. Stop dissembling ancient Greek texts and grammarians accounts to perpetuate an academic fraud. The entire notion of zeta being anything but z is based on the deliberate fraudulent misinterpretation of Dionysios Thrax who says that the sound of zeta could be approximated by sigma superposed with delta which from what has says about the mediae and comparisons with Hebrew, Aramaic and proto-Semitic was pronounced "the" like in modern Greek when he wrote his acocunt and zeta was therefore pronounced z. The z sound in Hebrew comes from two sources, the first z sound derives from pure proto-Semitic z which underwent no change at all in all Semitic languages and the second derives from proto-semtic delta which is the same fricative sound as modern Greek delta and became corrupted into z in Hebrew, Akkadian and Ethiopic and has remained as fricative delta in Arabic (as the letter "da" ie. δα). Stop trying to pull the wool over your own and other peoples eyes. --Thrax 18:52, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Systematicity of sound-symbol relationships 

message: Yannos 01:35, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Oux opos ouden alithes nomizo einai. Double negative. So you think I am telling the truth. Now why don't you try writing in Klingon if you don't want me reading what you are saying. --Thrax 04:57, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

text: Maxime tibi assentio mi Ioanne. Istum enim Vicipediasten, qui nomen illustrissimi illius grammaticorum sibi assumere ausus est, alio in interretis loco cognovi, ubi nomine non minus illustri, clarissimi anactos andron, uti solebat; ex quo certe scio eum neque disputare humane, neque intelligenter legere, neque linguam illam, quam defendere contra dectractores nimio impetu vult, certe comprehendere posse. Quod si libellus illius graeculi, qui theologus in Thule insula est, nostri amici imaginationem mire incendisse videtur, est quod mihi ipso exprobro: nam ego fui qui eius animum ad libellum illum converti, cum in foro quodam Vsenet vulgo appellato de lingua graeca disputabamus. Paucis diebus postquam nomen theologi in foro illo enuntiaveram, anax andron in thracen se convertit Vicipediaeque in orbe subito ortus est, nullud alium in animo habens quam ut cogitationes ridiculissimas illius quam celerrime in sermonem vostrum immisceat. Quousque tandem, o amici, abutetur patientia nostra? --Lukas 15:23, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thrax, in ancient greek yoannes says, : It seems to me (edokei moi) that in things that  he wrote(gegrammenwn up'autou ) there isn't truth (ouden alethes einai ). So he doesn't think that you are right. F.S.S:D P.S qousque tu, catilina abutere patentia nostra ? It seems that lukasis kikero's fan! Me too! Philx 12:13, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: You missed out oux which makes it a double negative. --Thrax 02:08, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  There is no double negative here. I guess you can say whatever when you know little. oux opws = ou monon ou. In other words, in a language that you perhaps understand, oux opws means oxi mono den. End of discussion 66.183.163.115 04:19, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

text: You are talking complete and utter nonsense. Oux opos ouden is a double negative end of discussion. If Yannos meant something else he did not say it. --Thrax 05:16, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

text:  This is getting funnier and funnier. If I meant something else I didn't say it! The whole point was for Thrax to do some decyphering. Oh well, I shouldn't be too mean I guess. This is a short translation for Thrax so I can practice my modern Greek: Κι από τα άλλα τα πολλά που είπε ο Θρακιώτης όχι μόνο δεν πιστεύω ότι τίποτα δεν είναι αλήθεια αλλά ούτε καν να τα διαβάζω πια δεν θέλω. Is this clearer? Anyway, I am not interested in debating this any further (this aim of this page is different)Yannos 02:01, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  More double negatives. You don't don't believe that nothing is not true so you think I am telling the truth. --Thrax 13:35, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  On Thrax 

message: This user has already started an article about Ancient Greek Phonology at User:Chronographos/Greek pronounciation. However, he has not done any edits after August 2005. We should take care not to do duplicate work. Andreas 15:20, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Work already done by [[User:Chronographos]] 

message: 1. The claim that the dasea in ancient Greek were aspirated labial plosives. Either prove that the dasea in Latin were originally aspirated labial plosives as well or else withdraw the claim, label it as impossible to prove or include the counter argument that the dasea evolved directly into fricatives like they did in Latin.
2. The claim that the mediae in ancient Greek were plosives. Dionysios Thrax makes it clear in his account dating to 100 BC that they could not have been anything but fricatives. Either prove Dionysios Thrax is wrong or else withdraw the claim or include the opposing evidence.
3. The claims relating to major fifths attributed Dionysios of Halicarnaus. Cite the full text of this quote in ancient Greek (a translation is not acceptable) in full context or else remove the claim.
:: — "the melody of speech is measured by a single interval, approximately that termed a fifth, and does not rise to the high pitch by more than three tones and a semitone, nor fall to the low by more than this amount."
4. The claim that the alleged changes in ancient Greek took place in Hellenistic times and not before. This claim is unsustainable based on the inscriptional record and given that the Phoenician alphabet renders the mediae and dasea as allophones of both fricatives and plosives and that the Greek translation of the Hebrew bible made in 280 BC indicates that in almost all instances the mediae and dasea of the original Hebrew were already pronounced as fricatives at the time in question according to Hebrew scholars. Substantiate this claim or else remove it or state clearly that inscriptional evidence and comparisons with Semitic languages and scripts and Proto-Semitic phonology indicate that the dasea and mediae could have always been fricatives since the time the proto-Sinaitic script (Phoenician/Hebrew) was adopted by the Greeks .
5. Show that reconstructed pronunciation is still viable when taking into account modern evidence that argues against it such as that cited above or else make it perfectly clear that it is a 19th century theory that is over 200 years old and is therefore out of date and in the same category of dogma as the Earth cantered universe and accept that other theories which work better also exist. --Thrax 18:54, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: You have NOT provided any EVIDENCE to substantiate any of these claims period. Repetition of the claims does NOT constitute evidence nor does it constitute proof. Now answer my questions and provide incontrovertible evidence or I will delete the unsubstantiated passages. Hatzidakis has never said that he agrees with the reconstructed pronunciation nor has he provided any evidence or done any research in favour of it. The reconstructed pronunciation is a point of view based on OUT OF DATE 19th Century Germanic linguistics that ignores modern Greek pronunciation, the origins of the Semtic alphabet that the Greeks adopted, the inscriptional record and ancient grammarians accounts that contradict it and is therefore NOT a valid scientific theory. The reconstructed pronunciation is the linguistic equivalent of the flat Earth theory. Modern research shows that it is invalid and unworkable. I have provided the evidence and the quotes that prove that. Now you do the same or I will delete your unsubstantiated claims with more justification than you had when you deleted my substantiated counter arguments.--Thrax 20:38, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I have already provided sources and you deleted them with no justification. --Thrax 20:38, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

text: Apart for the fact that it's virtually illegible what you have attributed to Hatzidakis is NOT a scientific thesis nor a scientific paper. Repetition of the claims reconstructed pronunciation without substantiating evidence and a through evaluation of the counter evidence and arguments of its opponents is NOT proof of the reconstructed pronunciation. The fact is that there is NO evidence whatsoever for the reconstructed pronunciation and that is precisely why you cannot cite any. The reconstructed pronunciation is an academic fraud that was shown to be a fraud by Thanos Papadimitrakopoulos in 1889 and is contradicted by all Semitic scholars who have shown that Hebrew and Aramaic pronounced the dasea and mediae as fricatives in 280 BC using comparison with Greek transcriptions of the time. Since the Hebrew dasea and mediae were fricatives then so are the Greek of the same period and that is what Semitic linguists are saying and this means that they must have already been fricatives in Greek long before the Hellenistic period, ie. in pre-Classical Archaic times for the Hebrews to transcribed Hebrew into Greek as such. The reconstructed pronunciation is therefore scientifically UNTENABLE and UNPROVABLE ! It is a Germanic point of view which is WRONG. --Thrax 21:49, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Substantiate the following claims else I will delete them

message: Thanks to Lukas and many other editors, the article is becoming very good.  But Thrax is back to pushing his POV.  I really don't like reverting without discussing, but at this point, Thrax has repeated the same arguments many times, and doesn't seem to have any new ones.  So there doesn't seem to be much point to discussing on Talk or even in the edit comments.  I consulted admin Kwamikagami on this, and here is his advice (also on his Talk page):
:If [Thrax] starts playing the 3RR game (violating the spirit of the rule by reverting 3x a day), I may block him for that. But if it's merely an annoyance factor of him making contributions no one else agrees with, then it's easy enough for the rest of you as a group to revert him. There's no need to defend the article - you've discussed it ad nauseum, and Thrax has shown himself immune to evidence. In other articles where I've seen this happen (one editor repeatedly but sincerely reverting to an unsubstantiated POV, and either unable or unwilling to understand standards of research), after a while the other editors didn't defend what they're doing, didn't answer his attacks, didn't interact with him at all, they just automatically reverted anything he did. Yes, it's annoying, but it doesn't take more than a minute or two. After a while he gave up. (Okay, it was after a long while. *sigh*)
:The alternative, as I see it, is to ask for dispute resolution. That requires that you formally prepare your case. It's up to you to decide whether it's worth your time to do that, rather than each of you spending a minute a day restoring the article. 
So let's just restore the article to the consensus position when Thrax damages it, and ignore his comments. --Macrakis 21:42, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Preserving the quality of the article

message: I've uploaded some photos at http://photobucket.com/albums/d92/eyes60/xatzidakis-1902/ - these are from the 1902 version of the study Hadjidakis wrote. I also have 120 photos of the 1924 version of the same study, but I cannot upload it right now. Three other books are Phonology by Bambiniotis (Ιστορική Γραμματεία της Αρχαίας Ελληνικής Γλώσσας, 1. Φωνολογία), The Sound of Greek by W.B. Stanford, 1967 and Greek Aspirates by Elizabeth Dawes, 1894. The works by Hatzidakis and by Stanford seem to me as the most interesting for this article, however I must repeat that linguistics is not my field of expertise. +MATIA  ☎ 23:41, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: And http://photobucket.com/albums/d92/eyes60/xatzidakis-1924/ +MATIA  ☎ 00:11, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  some sources 

message: Unless someone (other than Thrax) objects, I think that the history of the reconstructed pronunciation should come first in the article, providing context and motivation for the system reconstructed in the rest of the article. Yannos 06:06, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Why would Thrax object ? It was Thrax who tried to do that in the first place. --Thrax 01:51, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

text: Like modern Greek unless you can prove otherwise which is something you have not done and cannot do since there is no evidence to support anything to the contrary. --Thrax 01:51, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

text: Greek has always been pronounced the same way. The whole idea of dialect is totally meaningless unless it is accepted that the Greek alphabet was pronounced in exactly the same by Homer, Plato, Cleopatra, Constantine and Saferis. If this were not so how can you say that dialects existed based on spelling. They could have been spelled differently but still pronounced the same if the pronunciation of the alphabet was not the same for everybody. You can't have it both ways. Either the alphabet never changed its sound or different Greek dialects did not exist. --Thrax 01:51, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

text: You are right. I changed my mind.Yannos 21:39, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for your reply.  (I am intentionally ignoring Thrax's comments, which are both off-topic and substantively, um, bizarre.) --Macrakis 03:55, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm going to revert Thrax' re-ordering of the structure. After the discussion above, my impression was that the consensus was in fact to leave the structure as is. Thrax, please don't do this without discussing things and taking other people's opinions seriously. Lukas 20:08, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Maybe put history of the reconstructed pronunciation first in the article 

message: Back from a two-weeks Wiki break, I'm pleased to see that a lot of nice work has gone into the article while I was away. 
I'm now looking for a way to better integrate the material taken over from the old Chronographos article in the introduction. It certainly contains useful ideas, but I'm not quite happy with its wording in some details:
*"The concept of orthography was absent in Ancient Greek."
::I can see what we are trying to say here, but do we really agree on so strong a statement? After all, there were such things as officially "reforming" orthography, like the 403BC decision in Athens mentioned somewhere later in the article. That does imply an awareness that orthographic norms are to some degree arbitrary social conventions, doesn't it?
*"In contrast to modern practice, the Ancient Greeks did not read what they wrote"
::That's slightly misleading in a rather funny way, now, isn't it?
*"To the degree that the relation between phoneme and grapheme was bijective..."
::But we did establish during earlier discussions that it really wasn't, didn't we?
Lukas 20:34, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Introductory paragraphs 

message: The diphthong ηυ, obtained by augmenting ευ or αυ (), seems to be the only one with long first part and υ second part. (There is no ωυ). It is not yet in the article. Andreas 23:04, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: ωυ doe exist, see http://www.ccel.org/s/smyth/grammar/html/smyth_1a_notes.htm also mentioned by Erasmus Andreas 23:19, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

text: Thanks to you both for pointing out my oversight. I'll give it another try later. What it seems to boil down to is a 2-by-2 way classification of diphthongs then, right? long vs. short first element on the one hand, and back vs. front second element on the other. Lukas 09:47, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  ηυ 

message: The current name is overly verbose and has absolutely no merit. Please reinstate the perfectly NPOV title Ancient Greek phonology. If you want to vote about it, kindly do it after the consensus title has been restored. Thank you for being reasonable.
Peter Isotalo 21:39, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It must, must it? I disagree that everybody has to accept a unilateral move to a non-consensus version pending action from Requested moves with its notorious backlog (see prominent box at the top of the RM page). I have moved the page back to Ancient Greek phonology. The editor who performed the unilateral move is kindly requested not to pull stunts like that. If you want the title changed, please start a straw poll about it. Bishonen | talk 11:00, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I have changed the title back to the neutral version which describes exactly what the article is about. Until the article gives opposing theories equal merit and labels all references to the postulates of the reconstructed pronunciation as such then the reconstructed pronunciation title should remain. --Thrax 18:38, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article title 

message: User:Ανδρέας has undone the move, and I have given Thrax a block warning, since a polite request regretfully went nowhere. Bishonen | talk 19:24, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Move reverted and user warned

message: I agree with Macrakis. The article is now very good and no longer needs a discussion tag, and certainly not a 'disputed' tag. Thrax, stop editing against consensus. Andreas 20:25, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tag 

message: Thrax started a POV fork named The historical pronunciation of ancient Greek Andreas 20:35, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Its not a POV fork. Its the evidence of the opposing views that you would not permit to be included in this article which you have hijacked and turned into a POV rant on the reconstructed pronunciation. --Thrax 20:44, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Your description of it as "evidence of the opposing views" classifies it immediately as a POV fork. --Macrakis 20:51, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  POV fork 

message: I copypaste below a note that I've posted to Talk:The historical pronunciation of ancient Greek. I suggest that all discussion of the fork be conducted on one page, rather than being itself forked—at a venture, on this page, Talk:Ancient Greek phonology.
I agree that this article is by definition, and by Thrax' description of its contents and purpose, a POV fork of Ancient Greek phonology. Thrax, please read the page POV fork which Andreas linked to above, where the problems inherent in article forks are explained very clearly. That said, The historical pronunciation of ancient Greek now exists in the article namespace, and is as such part of the wiki, in other words other people than the original author are allowed, even encouraged, to edit it. Those editors of Ancient Greek phonology who disapprove of its existence have the option (besides, obviously, listing it on WP:AFD) of turning it into a redirect to Ancient Greek phonology, either by being bold, or by first attempting to form a consensus. Thrax, btw, you seem to use the word "consensus" in the sense of "agreement by 100 % of the editors". This is not unreasonable, but it's not how the word is used on Wikipedia. An agreement between everybody else, with only one person holding out, is a good (unusually good!) wiki consensus. Therefore, if the new article you created should be redirected by consensus, please don't edit war about it. Also, please stop adding the Totally Disputed tag to Ancient Greek phonology, as it clearly does have a consensus version. Bishonen | talk 22:53, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Sounds good. But I notice that the Guide to deletion explicitly warns against doing both WP:AFD and turning the offending article into a redirect at the same time. So perhaps we might need to discuss this first so we don't end up stepping on each other's toes? I agree that Thrax' POV fork shouldn't be allowed to stand. Lukas 23:07, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Good heavens, yes, thanks for pointing it out. Do not do both in the same timeframe, they're mutually exclusive. Bishonen | talk 23:27, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

text: "The historical pronunciation of ancient Greek" is not a POV fork. Its a seperate theory with its own advocates in academia which you want to suppress. I propose merging the contents of "The historical pronunciation of ancient Greek" with that of "Ancient Greek phonology" as a compromise. A redirect would be totally misleading since "Ancient Greek phonology" as its stands is a one sided POV rant on the reconstructed pronouncation. Otherwise rename "Ancient Greek phonology" to "The reconstructed pronunciation of Ancient Greek" and leave "The historical pronunciation of ancient Greek" where it is as a separate article and create an article on Erasmian pronunciation as well so that all theories are represented. And people ganging up again someone else with an opposing view and who has provided evidenced from academics who support it is not a consenssus but an attempt at academic fraud. --Thrax 23:20, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

text: I like redirects, Thrax's title is something people could guess at, so I made the redirect. Stefán Ingi 23:31, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Alternative ways of dealing with forks

message: Up until the 15th century (during the time of the Byzantine Greek Empire) ancient Greek texts were pronounced exactly like modern Greek when they were read aloud both by Greeks and non-Greeks using received pronunciation, until the Dutch classicist Desiderious Erasmus Roterdamus (1494-1553) questioned weather ancient Greek might have been pronounced differently as a result of a trick that was played on him by the Swiss scholar Henricus Glareanus who lied to Erasmus that he heard certain Greek scholars pronouncing Greek in a different manner to everyone else. This brought Erasmus attention to the fact that the Greeks gave several letters to the sound i, whereas for example Latin transliterated eta with the letter e and not i. Thus in 1528 Erasmus wrote a dialogue between a bear and a lion in which he concocted a new system of pronouncing ancient Greek, but on finding out that he had been tricked he quickly disowned the pronunciation he had concocted and continued to use the received pronunciation instead. 
The system Erasmus concocted gave the Greek consonants β, γ, δ, θ and χ the un-Greek sounds of /b/, /g/, /d/, dz (or zd), /t/ and /k/, and the vowels η, υ, ω the sounds of /e/ (as in Germ), u or y, and o (as in for) and pronounced the diphthongs as separate letters. 
Advocates of the Greek system of pronunciation agree that there was a simplification in the vowel system but they do not agree that the consonants have ever been pronounced differently in ancient Greek.  Koine had seven vowels, two of which η and ω were long, two ε and ο were short and three α, ι, υ were either long or short. Alongside the individual vowels there were diphthongs αι, αυ, ει, ευ, οι and ου,  and several rarer ones. Most noticeably, the vowels i, ē, y, and diphthongs ei, oi (ι, η, υ, ει, οι) have all become i in modern Greek. 
Several hundred years after Erasmus the English resurrected the system that he had abandoned, and sought to put it on a scientific footing using Germanic linguistic theory and comparisons with reconstructed Latin pronunciation and other indo-European languages, but took no notice of modern Greek pronunciation and the evidence found in inscriptions when they created their theroy. Therefore the reconstructed pronunciation was challenged by linguists in the 19th century after Greece became independent and the arguments of both sides resulted in stalemate with neither side being able to prove their view conclusively. By sheer force of numbers the reconstructed pronunciation has become the system most commonly used for ancient Greek pronunciation among linguists the English speaking world but not among classicists who prefer to pronounce ancient Greek in the same way their pronounce their own native language.  --Thrax 02:52, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: You are repeating yourself.  This has all been discussed at length before.  Stop wasting our time. --Macrakis 03:09, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Historical background to the reconstruction of Greek pronouncation