# Final -a of Greek letter names



## Dib

The Greek letter names (alpha, beta, gamma, delta, heta, ...) often seem to have an extra -a at the end, compared to their Canaanite names (aleph, bet, gimmel, daleth, heth, ...). My question is:

What is the origin of this extra -a?


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## entangledbank

Presumably just ease of pronunciation. The final sounds of the Semitic names didn't occur in Greek at the time of the borrowing. Final [m] had become [n], as in the neuter ending _-on_ (cf. Latin _-um_), final [t] had disappeared as in the nominative form of the suffix _-ma_ (cf. _-mat-_ in inflected case forms). So they had to add an epenthetic vowel to preserve the final [p], [t], [m], or [d].


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## francisgranada

entangledbank said:


> Presumably just ease of pronunciation ...


Plus, in my opinion,  the declinability. Even if e.g. _aleph _or _bet _could have been pronounced by the ancient Greeks, these words could not be declined as there is no adequate "natural" paradigm for their declension. Something similar happens also in some modern languages, see e.g. the Slovak _vízi*a* (= vision) _instead of _vízi*o*_, as there is no feminine noun in Slovak ending in _-o. _

(There are better examples as well, but at the moment I am not able to find any of them ... The substance is the modification of the nominative ending.)


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## fdb

We do not, as far as I can see, have any evidence for the vocalisation of the North-West Semitic letter names until well into the Christian era, apart (that is) from the evidence of the Greek letter names. It is entirely possible that at the time when the Greeks adopted these names from the Phoenicians the Semitic case endings were still pronounced in North-West Semitic, at least in a residual form. For example they could very well have said something like *bētə, and not bēϑ, as much later in Tiberian Hebrew and Syriac. Similarly, Greek κάππα implies a Semitic *kappə, which later loses its final vowel, then degeminates final pp to p (North-West Semitic does not tolerate word-final geminates), and finally (around the beginning of the Christian era) lenates the post-vocalic p to f. It is (I maintain) much easier to get from kappə > kap > kōf than it is to get from kōf + a > kappa.


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## Perseas

francisgranada said:


> Plus, in my opinion,  the declinability.


The words that correspond to the Greek letters are not declined. I mean alfa, vita,..., omega are indeclinable.

*α*,* ν*, *υ* (άλφ*α*,  ἒψιλό*ν*, μ*ῦ)*  are final letters in the Greek language. In my opinion this morphological element might have played a role.



(thanks berndf)


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## Dib

Thank you, everyone for your replies. Personally, I find fdb's argument the most likely, though of course there's no contradiction between the different scenarios proposed. So, more than one of these might have been active in parallel.


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## Ihsiin

fdb said:


> We do not, as far as I can see, have any evidence for the vocalisation of the North-West Semitic letter names until well into the Christian era, apart (that is) from the evidence of the Greek letter names. It is entirely possible that at the time when the Greeks adopted these names from the Phoenicians the Semitic case endings were still pronounced in North-West Semitic, at least in a residual form. For example they could very well have said something like *bētə, and not bēϑ, as much later in Tiberian Hebrew and Syriac. Similarly, Greek κάππα implies a Semitic *kappə, which later loses its final vowel, then degeminates final pp to p (North-West Semitic does not tolerate word-final geminates), and finally (around the beginning of the Christian era) lenates the post-vocalic p to f. It is (I maintain) much easier to get from kappə > kap > kōf than it is to get from kōf + a > kappa.



Can we not have some idea of their vocalisation by thinking of the original meanings in Phoenician of the words that stand in for letters? For example, _bēt_ meaning 'house' and _kapp_ meaning 'palm'. If we compare them with cognates in other Semitic languages (e.g. Arabic: بيت and كف) which do not end in a generic /a/, do we think then that it's likely that the words would have attained a final /a/ in Phoenician? And if not, can we postulate that the /a/ was added when the words become symbols for letters? But, is this hypothesis really any more likely then suggesting that the words attained the final /a/ when they were imported into Greek?

These are my thoughts. Perhaps I'm being too naive.


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## sotos

The final -a renders a greek meaning, or at least a similarity to greek, to some of those letters, if we assume that are really semitic in origin (which I doubt). For example, alpha is a shortened _alphita_ (wheat), gamma to gammos (wedding), delta to deltos (book). Koppa  (q) means (and looks like) κώπη (oar)   etc.


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## fdb

Ihsiin said:


> If we compare them with cognates in other Semitic languages (e.g. Arabic: بيت and كف) which do not end in a generic /a/, do we think then that it's likely that the words would have attained a final /a/ in Phoenician?



The Arabic cognates are baytun, kaffun, etc., with case ending plus -n. My suggestion is that in Old Canaanaic the endings were reduced to a neutral vowel, before dropping off completely.


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## Dib

fdb said:


> The Arabic cognates are baytun, kaffun, etc., with case ending plus -n. My suggestion is that in Old Canaanaic the endings were reduced to a neutral vowel, before dropping off completely.


 
Or even if the case endings hadn't collapsed to a neutral vowel, maybe the Greeks chose the -a ending of accusative rather than the -i, -u forms, because that aligned better with the numerous -a stem Greek noun forms? Does that sound at all plausible?


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## fdb

The problem with that is (as Perseas has reminded us) that the letter names in Greek are not feminine -a stems; they are indeclinable neuter nouns.


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## francisgranada

fdb said:


> The problem with that is (as Perseas has reminded us) that the letter names in Greek are not feminine -a stems; they are indeclinable neuter nouns.


 Are there also other neuter (indeclinable) nouns ending in _-a_ in Greek?

P.S. Perhaps, there is no practical need to decline the name of a letter, whatever be it's origin and gender ...


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## Gavril

francisgranada said:


> P.S. Perhaps, there is no practical need to decline the name of a letter, whatever be it's origin and gender ...



Why would this practical need be especially absent for letters, though, compared to other semantic categories? (For example, you might expect a sentence like "This word is written with 'a' at the end" to trigger an oblique case form for the word meaning "a".)

More likely, the problem is that letter names are usually adopted from another language (often as a group, along with the writing system they represent), and they may therefore be harder to fit into the existing inflectional patterns of the language that adopts them. Greek adopted the letter-names from Semitic, and certain other languages (e.g. Armenian) adopted the names from Greek.

The Roman alphabet has systematically replaced the Semitic letter names with simple monosyllables (_alpha_ > _ā_, _beta_ > _bē_, etc.). But I don't know if there have been any sweeping changes in the names of the letters since then (as opposed to sporadic additions of new letters, like Scandinavian _ø_).


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## ahvalj

Of the four post-Latin alphabets created in Europe, the Germanic ones (Futhark and Gothic), had declinable letter names, corresponding to ordinary nouns (hypothetically, Futhark: _*fehu, *ūruz, *þurisaz, *ansuz, *raidō, *kaunan…_ — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elder_Futhark#Rune_names and, very hypothetically, Gothic: _*ans, *bairka, *giba, *dags, *aiƕs, *qairþra_… — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_alphabet#The_letters), whereas both Slavic ones (Glagolitic and Cyrillic) used random words from different parts of the speech (_азъ/azъ_ "I", _бѹкы/buky_ "letter", _вѣдѣ/vědě_ "I know", _глаголи/glagoli_ "say!", _добро/dobro_ "good", _естъ/_(_j)estъ_ "is", _живѣте/ʒivěte_ "[Pl. 2] live!", _ѕѣло/ʣělo_ "very", _землꙗ/zemļa_ "Earth", _иже/jiʒe_ "those who", _како/kako_ "how", _людиѥ/ļudьje_ "humans"… — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Cyrillic_alphabet#Alphabet), of which only nouns/adjectives could be declined.

In Greek, the declination was carried out by the article: _τό άλφα, τοῦ άλφα, τῴ άλφα, τό άλφα, τά άλφα, τῶν άλφα…_ (https://books.google.ru/books?id=W6...ved=0CEYQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q="τά άλφα"&f=false — in the middle of the left column).


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## fdb

ahvalj said:


> In Greek, the declination was carried out by the article: _τό άλφα, τοῦ άλφα, τῴ άλφα, τό άλφα, τά άλφα, τῶν άλφα…_ (https://books.google.ru/books?id=W6xJAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA88&lpg=PA88&dq="τά+άλφα"&source=bl&ots=QAY0H6vBnP&sig=iMLcJcBjE56DRvrWXK7nVQD5Xrg&hl=ru&sa=X&ei=cAieVff3OcG4ygPH7qPoCg&ved=0CEYQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q="τά άλφα"&f=false — in the middle of the left column).




I am not sure that any of the oblique cases are attested in classical Greek (Stephanus included Byzantine and Ecclesiastical Greek in his Thesaurus). But maybe we can agree on “invariable” instead of “undeclinable”.


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## francisgranada

Gavril said:


> Why would this practical need be especially absent for letters, though, compared to other semantic categories? (For example, you might expect a sentence like "This word is written with 'a' at the end"  ...


Because we often say in various languages e.g. "This word is written with _the letter 'a'_ at the end", even if there's no problem with the "declinability" (as e.g. in Hungarian). This is only an idea ...


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