 | Re: Any nouns that end in ω? |
| Thank you as always Greg. |
| Re: Any nouns that end in ω? |
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North & Hilliard Greek Composition textbook in an appendix on accents, says that there is a class of Greek nouns ending in ω & that they are oxytone. One example is feminine πειθώ NGNAV πειθώ, πειθοῦς, πειθοί, πειθώ, πειθᾶ. No plurals. Stem is πειθο-. This is a 3rd declension o stem. There are no plural forms per Smyth. It means persuasion. It evidences vowel contractions of o+ω, o+o, o+ι,& ο+α. I don't know an explanation for the Vocative in long alpha. The vocative is probably an address to the goddess of this name. I don't know any other examples, but per N & H there must be some. So you can still nurse a heroic hypothesis if you think the word got that way by being a goddess, though goddesses are not heroes. One might consult a reverse list of Greek words (spelled backwards). In taking more look at this site, I guess it is devoted to modern Greek (IMHO a different language from classical Greek, as Italian is from Latin). So I suppose my comments are off topic. But on classical Greek: while postulating an o stem looked reasonable to me, I see that greater scholars than I (not hard to find) have deemed these quite a number (all feminine) nouns to be oι stems. And I came across an internet Brill research which really gets into the numerous oxytone nouns, used even for male & female sexual parts! Apparently they have no plural but if plural borrow from a different (not 3rd) declension, like 2nd declension for plural. This article has a nice categorization of their semantics, from hypocoristic to pejorative. Don't call a woman δαλλώ. I suppose that modern Greeks can look at this article & see how much of the ancient Greek omega oxytone feminine nouns have some counterpart in modern Greek. https://brill.com/view/journals/jgl/19/2/article-p168_3.xml?Xlanguage=en |
| Re: Any nouns that end in ω? |
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Right, η πειθώ (persuasion), with modern genitive πειθώς / learned genitive πειθούς, is an example of such a noun τhat survives into the contemporary language. And yes, this site is dedicated to Modern Greek, a language as sufficiently different from its ancient ancestor as Modern Italian is from Classical Latin. Regards, Greg Brush |
