Koinon Hellenon?

**Brynjolfr** · 01-13-2008, 22:34

"Koinon Hellenon" should be "Koinon Ellenon", due to the fact that greeks of that time didn't use the /h/ sound (even further back in history, however, they did); the eta letter (H) was, at the start of EB's timeframe, pronunced "e".

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H

Edit: Changed "ê" to "e".

**Hax** · 01-13-2008, 22:48

I do not think the R:TW engine allows special signs in names, eg é, è, ê, etc.

**Tellos Athenaios** · 01-13-2008, 23:33

That (the special characters) is not really a problem: see the Eastern names for some serious spelling [try and spell the names of 5 Iranian units correctly without looking things up]. We could add Greek characters, but we would have to cut the accents: the font we (aka the engine) use does not contain those (making it kinda pointless).

What the OP seems to overlook though, is the fact it is convention with transcriptions to stick to the customs of the 'receiving language' rather than those of the the original language. Especially so with Greek, it is almost a law to render the spirius asper (which the Greeks themselves used for the purpose in any case) or any other -h- sound with an h. So aspirated consonants and vowels receive an additional -h- to preserve the original sound better; hence the fact that the phi is written as -ph- rather than -f-. And if memory serves H for -h- sound was actually still in use by EB's timeframe. (More old-style Dorian dialects.)

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Apart from this there are numerous instances of omega and omikron transcriptions, in that case we can either go with additional accents, or as -in the case of Greek- is more common: to ingore the difference, at let this remain a matter to keep in mind for the audience. An example of this would be the fact that Parmenion is -to my knowledge- always rendered as Parmenion in English, even though it requires you to know that the -o- should be pronounced as in 'so' or 'know' (prolonged, pure vowel though).

**Teleklos Archelaou** · 01-14-2008, 00:03

They did have an aspirate though - the easiest way of showing it is that Greek words adopted into Latin have "h"s in front of them.

"Whilst the symbol "H" and its consonantal value dropped out of general use after the introduction of the Ionic alphabet, the presence of initial aspiration continued to be indicated by the substitution of the aspirated phi, theta, and chi, for the unaspirated final pi, tau, and kappa, before words beginning with the aspirate - e.g., "kath ekaston" = "kata +(h)ekaston". Even allowing for the conservative spelling of stereotyped phrases, practice in this respect testifies to the retention of the initial aspiration until about the 2nd c. AD. The loss of "H" seems in fact to be roughly contemporaneous with the development of the aspirated plosives to fricatives, and the two developments could well be connected.... That "H" had been lost, as in modern Greek, by the 4c. AD is indicated by its frequent omission or misplacement in Gothic transcriptions." - from Vox Graeca.