Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 November 18

= November 18 =

Modern Greek transliteration
Some transliterations of Modern Greek keep the ancient vowel sequences basically unchanged, others simply write the five phonemic vowels from the spoken language, and some, like on German Wikipedia, keep υ as y while merging ει, η, ι, οι as i – suggesting a diachronic phase that never existed. Given this range of variation, have any authors opted to split the difference by following the distribution before the final high vowel merger, with ει, η, ι as i and οι, υ, υι as y (e.g. "Óly y ánthropy…")? Lazar Taxon (talk) 03:29, 18 November 2023 (UTC)


 * The reason for the German Wikipedia practice presumably is that words spelled with the letter Upsilon in Greek often appear with a high front rounded vowel spelled "y" in German. I'm not sure what the reason for your hypothetical convention would be... AnonMoos (talk) 07:30, 18 November 2023 (UTC)
 * True, but they're not following the Greek-through-Latin loanword path (if they did, οι would become ö). My thinking with οι/υ/υι=y is that it represents a diachronic midpoint between the approaches that treat the vowels as fully modern and the ones that ignore the past 2,000 years of vowel evolution entirely – with the aim of preserving at least some of the traditional spelling distinctions, like η vs. οι for the definite article. Systems that render every /i/ as i just seem so oppressively uniform, which I think people in both Greece and the West could agree on. Lazar Taxon (talk) 07:48, 18 November 2023 (UTC)
 * The naming conventions of the German WP indicate that they are guided by the transcription practice on Greek town signs. --Wrongfilter (talk) 08:06, 18 November 2023 (UTC)
 * See also Romanization of Modern Greek. --Lambiam 11:12, 18 November 2023 (UTC)


 * Lazar_Taxon -- I'm pretty certain that an overwhelming majority of those who established the details of modern Greek Latinization conventions simply would not care about the detailed relative chronology of various Byzantine/medieval Greek sound changes in that context. That's not the type of thing they would have in mind when working out a transliteration scheme. AnonMoos (talk) 12:58, 18 November 2023 (UTC)