The Pronunciation of Upsilon and Related Matters

It is universally assumed that the fronting of inherited /u(ː)/ to /y(ː)/ was a relatively late development restricted to Attic-Ionic (to the significant exclusion of Euboean) and possibly to other dialects as well. This paper presents a re-assessment of the evidence available and challenges the general assumption that *u and *ū retained their inherited phonetic value /u(ː)/ in Proto-Greek. The alternative hypothesis is explored that the fronting of /u(ː)/ to /y(ː)/ dates back to Proto-Greek. The presence of /u(ː)/ in the ancient dialects can be accounted for through a secondary backing /y(ː)/ > /u(ː)/ like in the modern dialects.

Middle Chinese labial softening

Labiodentalization was an important phonetic change in Middle Chinese sounds. This essay introduces and analyzes Chinese scholars’ views and arguments on some problems on labiodentalization. These problems contain the exact time when the labiodentals developed from the bilabials in phonetic value, the condition of development and a special phenomenon of the onset spellers in the Division-III rhymes.

Could Xerxes push the land back? On understanding some fragments from the Satrap Stele of Ptolemy

The article deals with controversial fragments of the Satrap Stela. The examination of the sign in line 9 suggests that its phonetic value was sbj. This led to the grammatical reassessment of the translation in lines 8–9 as “... before <it> (=the Marshland Wadjet) passed into the possession of the rebel Xerxes”. Furthermore, the double meaning of Horus’ epithet HA.t/HA.t(.j) nTr.w xpr Hr-sA in line 11 was suggested. On the one hand, this phrase highlights Horus as the primeval god of creation in Buto. On the other hand, he was considered to be the son of Isis and Osiris, one who came into being later than the other gods, but became the supreme god. Moreover, controversial signs were regarded as the phrase (@r.w... Hr) wd nf sbj(.w). If so, the translation of line 11 may be “(Horus)... overthrew those rebels (namely) Xerxes in his palace and his elder son”.

The phonetic value of the Proto-Indo-European laryngeals

Discussion of the exact phonetic value of the so-called ‘laryngeals’ in Proto-Indo-European has been ongoing ever since their discovery, and no uniform consensus has yet been reached. This paper aims at introducing a new method to determine the quality of the laryngeals that differs substantially from traditional techniques previously applied to this problem, by making use of deep neural networks as part of the larger field of machine learning algorithms. Phonetic environment data serves as the basis for training the networks, enabling the algorithm to determine sound features solely by their immediate phonetic neighbors. It proves possible to assess the phonetic features of the laryngeals computationally and to propose a quantitatively founded interpretation.

Edit distance-based search approach for retrieving element-wise prosody/rhymes in Hindi-Urdu poetry

Background: Prosody (rhyming words) is a connatural element of poetry, throughout its reach, across thousands of languages in the world. Since medieval era, the Indic poetry (principally the Hindi/Urdu poetry) has created an impactful flamboyance w.r.t the subjects, styles, and other creative aspects in poetry. Besides the message of heartfelt poetry, we see the Qafiya (i.e., rhyming words) is the core element, without which we may not consider anything Hindi/Urdu poetry but merely a piece of writing; alongside it, Radif (i.e., a phrasal suffix to qafiya) is also considered next to the intrinsic part in Ghazals. In this regard, the contributions of this paper are one–the development of an optimal technique for the prosodic (qafiya) suggestions/retrieval in Hindi/Urdu poetry; and two–the qafiya suggestions based on the attached subsequent radif. Methods: The work in this paper involves usage of a 13.46 M tokens tri-script corpus of poetry. Instead of phonetic value matching, the proposed methodology employs four different Edit Distances (i.e., Levenshtein, Damerau–Levenshtein, Jaro–Winkler, and Hamming distance) as the comparison measures for prosodic suggestions. Findings: The proposed work shows better results in comparison to ‘Qaafiya Dictionary’ powered by rekhta.org. Moreover, w.r.t the inter-metric similarity and running time Jaro–Winkler appears to be the most optimal algorithm for the rhyme suggestion, whereas the Levenshtein distance is the laziest technique. Novelty/Applications: This work benefits researchers of Indic natural language processing for lexical look-ups and analysis of creative literature, especially poetry.

The ‘U’ and ‘V’ Alternation in the History of English

In the Early Modern English period (roughly 1500s–1700s), the use of the letters &lt;u&gt; and &lt;v&gt; went through a change from a positionally constrained system (initial &lt;v&gt;, medial &lt;u&gt;) to a system based on phonetic value, with &lt;u&gt; marking vowel and &lt;v&gt; consonant sounds. The exact dynamics of this transition have received little attention, however, and the standard account is exclusively based on printed sources. Using a dataset of ca. 4,000 examples from over 100 handwritten legal documents from the witch trials in Salem, MA, in 1692–1693, this study indicates that the current narrative is oversimplified and that behind the transition from one system to another lies a complex process of experimentation and variation. The study charts the &lt;u&gt; and &lt;v&gt; usage in the handwriting of nineteen recorders who subscribe to various “mixed” systems that conform neither to the positional nor the phonetic system. In addition to the positional and phonetic constraints, a range of other linguistic and extralinguistic factors appears to have influenced the recorders’ alternation between &lt;u&gt; and &lt;v&gt;, from lexical item and graphotactics to textual history.

The origin of the phonetic value of the Anatolian hieroglyphic sign *41 (CAPERE/tà)

Following Rieken’s 2008 establishment that the Anatolian hieroglyphic sign *41 (CAPERE/ta) denoted the syllable /da/, with lenis /d/, Yakubovich (2008) argued that the sign’s phonetic value was acrophonically derived from the Hittite verb dā-i/d- ‘to take’. In the present article it is argued that this view can no longer be upheld in view of new proposals regarding the phonetic value of sign *41 (rather [da]) and the interpretation of Hitt. dā-i/d- (rather [tʔā-]). It is proposed that the value of sign *41 has instead been derived from the Luwian verb ‘to take’, lā-i/l-, which from a historical linguistic perspective must go back to earlier *.ā-i/ *.-. This acrophonic assignment of the value [da] to sign *41 must then be dated to the beginning of the 18th century BCE at the latest, which implies that already by that time the Anatolian hieroglyphs were in use as a real script that made use of phonetic signs.