Talk:νόος

Issue with post-Classical IPA transliterations

The Ancient Greek pronunciation template is not properly applying syllable break dots to the post-Classical IPA transliterations.

This is leaving the word a monosyllable (see below) with Long Close O — a phoneme not known to exist in Greek after the Koine shift of ου from /o:/ to /u:/.

For this word the normal post-Classical form is the contraction νους, which is a monosyllable, and shifted to /nu:s/ post-Classically.

But anyone reading νοος in the Koine and later periods would have had to say it disyllabically.

Another point for your system, is that by your "Byzantine" period, the pronunciation of νοος was probably [nɔ.ɔs] rather than [no.os] as (standard) Church Greek seems to have had the Modern Greek 5-vowel system of /ɑ ɛ i ɔ u/ by then — if I'm not mistaken.

Note that it is common, but erroneous, to omit the syllable break dot in IPA transcriptions. But when it does not appear between two vowels this technically makes them a diphthong or long vowel (an undertie on vowels is pleonastic). In this case with νοος the dot is being properly used for the "Classical" IPA, and then not for the later IPA versions — so even for those accustomed to not seeing the dot, the contrast is ambiguous and confusing.

— This unsigned comment was added by 98.180.31.100 (talk) at 12:22–12:24, 9 September 2012.