(urth) Grand Unified Theory

[António Marques]

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:

> I deeply mistrust anyone who claims to know how the ancients -- ANY
> ancients -- pronounced things. Unless the Greeks left a text
> (something like the opening movement of de Saussure's _Cours de
> Linguistique Generale_) that actually describes the mouth and throat
> movements involved in each letter,

But of course such works do exist, even if not using modern terminology 
and not always painting a complete picture. And much can be gathered 
from the subsequent evolution and loawords in other languages. F.i. 
greek <y> is borrowed into popular latin as <u> (krypth > crupta)*.

(*) Their descendents in english being crypt and grotto, the first 
borrowed from greek by people who could make sense of greek texts, the 
second from italian by people who could speak at least some italian.

> the most we have is a high probability that, say, the kappa was
> pronounced like the modern English kay. Was psyche pronounced
> SOO-kie? I don't know.

But I and a lot of others do: not in any relevant dialect.
Rather psoo-GHAY, to use the notation we've all come to loathe.

Nobody can tell exactly how it was pronounced, if nothing else because 
pronunciations varied according to region and epoch, as in any other 
language. But the issue here is not how T U Ph W~ N was pronounced, it's 
how it couldn't be. And there is no known dialect in which U could be 
[ai] as it is in english. And if it wasn't [ai], it's hard to see how it 
could have become [ai] in the asiatic language english took typhoon 
from. NB it did become [ai] in english typhon, but only because it was a 
spelling pronunciation based on a mistaken value for greek <υ>. I 
haven't seen anyone propose such an unnatural route for typhoon.

The best I've seen so far is below, though it gives no evidence at all 
for the greek connection:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/typhoon
typhoon
the modern word represents a coincidence and convergence of at least two 
unrelated words of similar sound and sense. Tiphon  "violent storm, 
whirlwind, tornado" is recorded from 1555, from Gk. typhon  "whirlwind," 
personified as a giant, father of the winds, perhaps from typhein  "to 
smoke." The meaning "cyclone, violent hurricane of India or the China 
Seas" (1588) is first recorded in T. Hickock's translation of an account 
in Italian of a voyage to the East Indies by Cæsar Frederick, a merchant 
of Venice, probably borrowed from, or infl. by, Chinese (Cantonese) tai 
fung  "a great wind," from tu  "big" + feng  "wind;" name given to 
violent cyclonic storms in the China seas. A third possibility is tufan, 
  a word in Arabic, Persian and Hindi meaning "big cyclonic storm" (and 
the source of Port. tufao ), which may be from Gk. typhon  but commonly 
is said to be a noun of action from Arabic tafa  "to turn round."
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper


If you ask me, the probability is for arabic tufan for the portuguese 
version and cantonese tai fung for the english one. The english one 
having been folk etymologised as coming from greek tufwn, which in latin 
is typhon, thus getting its <y>.