Can you give an example of a sentence containing a foreign name? Foreign from what source? Phoenician? Fascinating question. Sanskriit has a mark for the end of a word, doesn't it?
Dear Cynthia, It is certainly a fascinating question, please provide more information though about the vowel context that this cluster appears, the source language of the words transcribed, and also about the time period of the texts. The point might indicate a different pronunciation of this cluster in the source language. Do you also find this in words of Greek origin as well? Best regards, Haris Themistocleous
Thank you so much, Martha and Charalambos. I'm sorry it's taken so long for me to discover your replies. These would be non-Greek Biblical proper names in Byzantine Greek liturgical mss. that end (at least in the Greek transcription) in a consonant cluster. Unfortunately I don't have an example; I've just been told about this phenomenon in a personal communication. I've just recently been referred to Bruce Metzger's Manuscripts of the Greek Bible. An Introduction to Paleography p.31, section 18, but since I'm out of the country now I'll have to wait a few weeks to see what it says.
I'm trying to confirm whether this was a New Testament Greek paleographic/orthographic practice because I'm preparing an edition of a 13th-cen. Bulgarian Church Slavonic gospel ms. that occasionally adds a dot over liquid consonant letters in words where canonical Old Church Slavonic (pre-1100) has a reduced vowel letter following the liquid. (These are mid-word dots, not word-final, since all words in Church Slavonic ended in a vowel letter.) This dot is not a feature of Slavic mss. generally and this is the only ms. I know to have it. Some vernacular Middle Bulgarian dialects generally pronounced the reduced vowel before a liquid, not after it, and while the copyist spells these words correctly according to Old Church Slavonic norms, it seems to me that he's suggesting that the reduced vowel can be pronounced before the liquid (or is giving the reader a choice). Since it was brought to my attention by a Slavic medieval philologist colleague that she had heard in a seminar on Greek paleography that transcriptions of word-final consonant clusters could sport a dot that suggested the insertion of a vocalic element. I'd like to suggest that a Greek convention is the source for the dot over liquid consonant letters in this ms., so I'm looking for a citation for it. Many thanks to both of you!
P.S. The Church Slavonic ms. is written in Old Cyrillic. The Church Slavonic liturgical texts were translations from a fairly late Greek source (9th-cen., probably), and many Bulgarian scribes knew Greek well.
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