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Re: Greek rho

From:Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Saturday, February 7, 2004, 18:05
On Friday, February 6, 2004, at 11:27 PM, Adam Walker wrote:

> Does anyone know what Koine/Byzantine rho was > pronounced like? Was it /r/ or /4/ or what?
'Yes' is the answer to 'Was it [r] or [4]?' (It was always /r/, of course :) The modern Greek pronunciation is the alveolar tap [4] like Spanish medial & final |r| (it occurs also in some Scots dialects). As for the ancient Greek sound, Dionysos of Halikarnassos describes it as pronounced by "the tip of the tongue rising to the palate near the teeth" and "fanning" or "beating out" the air (difference in the MSS - some have _aporripizouse:s_ others have _aporrapizouse:s_, but the meaning is much the same). Plato describes it as the "least static and most vibrant" of sounds. This must surely be describing the trilled [r] of Italian, Welsh & some Scots pronunciations (Spanish |rr|). The ancient sound also had an aspirated or voiceless variant which the Romans habitually transcribed as |rh| even tho it had no phonemic status in ancient Greek (it was very occasionally written either as |hr| or |rh| by Greeks themselves in those local alphabets that had a letter for /h/. It occurred when /r/ began a word or was geminate in the middle of a word. There is no reason to suppose it was other than the same sound as modern Welsh |rh| - indeed, the fact that the greeks hesitated between the spellings |hr| and |rh| surely indcates that the trill & aspiration were coterminous exactly as in modern Welsh. (The Roman practice of always spelling it |rh| was doubtless influenced by the spelling of Greek theta, phi & khi as |th|, |ph| and |ch|). Now obviously at some stage the vibrant [r] became just the flapped [4]. Basically, the modern pronunciations seem to have been established by the Byzantine period. I suspect that during the Koine /r/ received a variety of regional variants depending upon the L1/L2 of its speakers. By the Byzantine period, aspiration had disappeared (theta, phi and khi having become fricatives, and initial /h/ having become silent) so we may safely assume that the ancient [r_h] or [r_0] had gone also. We simply have no way of knowing whether [r] was still the normal pronunciation of rho at the beginning of the Byzantine period and the change to [4] occurred later, or whether the change occurred during the Hellenistic period (i.e. in the Koine) and that the Byzantine pronunciation was [4] as in modern Greek. My guess is the latter - but without time travel we cannot be certain :) Ray =============================================== http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown ray.brown@freeuk.com (home) raymond.brown@kingston-college.ac.uk (work) =============================================== "A mind which thinks at its own expense will always interfere with language." J.G. Hamann, 1760

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Adam Walker <carrajena@...>