Re: Greek rho

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
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