Ancient Greek phonology: Encyclopedia II - Ancient Greek phonology - Types of arguments and evidence used in reconstruction

Ancient Greek phonology - Types of arguments and evidence used in reconstruction

The above information is based on a large body of evidence which was discussed extensively by linguists and philologists of the 19th and 20th centuries. The following section provides a short summary of the kinds of evidence and arguments that have been used in this debate, and gives some hints as to the sources of uncertainty that still prevails with respect to some details.

Ancient Greek phonology - Internal evidence

As is the case whenever an alphabetic script is devised or adopted for a language, a significant degree of systematicity, if not a one to one correspondence, is at play between the letters of the alphabet and the sounds of the language it represents. This renders spelling mistakes unlikely "by design" for as long as the pronunciation of the language remains unchanged, following the adoption of the alphabet. As the pronunciation undergoes change over successive generations of speakers, either the spelling conventions end up changing in an attempt to reflect the corresponding changes in pronunciation, or else the spelling remains conservative, and a traditional spelling becomes established. In the former case, which may be termed a spelling reform, the date of introduction of the reform provides a date a quo for the corresponding changes in pronunciation. In the latter case, when a historical orthography is established, spelling mistakes by writers with imperfect knowledge of the writing conventions become the principal tools that allow linguists to reconstruct pronunciation and date its evolution over time.

• If it is found that scribes very often confuse two letters, then it can be inferred that the sounds denoted by the two letters had merged into one in speech. This happened early, for instance, between <ι> and <ει>, a little later between <υ> and <οι>, between <ο> and <ω>, and between <ε> and <αι>, later still between <η> and the already merged <ι> and <ει>.

• If it is found that scribes very often omit a letter where it would be needed in standard orthography, or that they falsely insert it where it did not belong (hypercorrection), then it can be inferred that the sound denoted by that letter had been lost in speech. This happened early with word-initial [h] spiritus asper in most forms of Greek. Another example is the occasional omission of the subscripted iota of long diphthongs (see above).

Spelling mistakes are an important type of evidence, but they have their limitations. They only prove that the phonetic development in question existed in the language of the particular scribe, not that it was adopted universally by all speakers of the language at the time. Ancient Greek was not homogeneous or static, but a language divided in many regional variants and social registers. Many of the linguistic features characteristic of Late and Modern Greek was probably anticipated in some dialects and some registers of Attic already in the Classical Age, but the older varieties seem to have persisted for centuries.

Greek literature sometimes contains representations of animal cries in Greek letters. The most often quoted example is "βῆ βῆ", used to render the cry of sheep, and is used as evidence that beta had a voiced bilabial plosive pronunciation and eta was a long open-mid front vowel. Onomatopoeic verbs such as μυκάομαι for the lowing of cattle (cf. Latin mugire), βρυχάομαι for the roaring of lions (cf. Latin rugire) and κόκκυξ as the name of the cuckoo (cf. Latin cuculus) suggest an archaic [u:] pronunciation of long upsilon, before this vowel was fronted to [y:].

Sounds undergo regular changes, such as assimilations or dissimilations, in certain environments within words, which are sometimes indicated in writing. These can be used to reconstruct the nature of the sounds involved.

• <π,τ,κ> at the end of some words are regularly changed to <φ,θ,χ> when preceding a spiritus asper in the next word. Thus, e.g.: ἐφ' ἁλός for ἐπὶ ἁλός or καθ' ἡμᾶς for κατὰ ἡμᾶς.
• <π,τ,κ> at the end of the first member of composite words are regularly changed to <φ,θ,χ> when preceding a spiritus asper in the next member of the composite word. Thus e.g.: ἔφιππος, καθάπτω
• The Attic dialect in particular is marked by contractions: two vowels without an intervening consonant were merged together in a single syllable; for instance uncontracted (disyllabic) <εα> ([e.a]) occurs regularly in dialects but contracts to <η> in Attic, supporting the view that η was pronounced [εː] (intermediate between [e] and [a]) rather than [iː] as in Modern Greek. Similarly, uncontracted <εε>, <οο> ([e.e], [ο.ο]) occur regularly in Ionic but contract to <ει> and <ου> in Attic, suggesting [eː], [οː] values for the spurious <ει> and <ου> diphthongs in Attic as opposed to the [i] and [u] sounds they later acquired.

Morphophonological alternations like the above are often treated differently in non-standard spellings than in standardised literary spelling. This may lead to doubts about the representativity of the literary dialect and may in some cases force slightly different reconstructions than if one were only to take the literary texts of the high standard language into account. Thus, e.g.:

• non-standard epigraphical spelling sometimes indicates assimilation of final <κ> το <γ> before voiced consonants in a following word, or of final <κ> το <χ> before aspirated sounds, in words like ἐκ.

The metres used in Classical Greek poetry are based on the patterns of light and heavy syllables, and can thus sometimes provide evidence as to the length of vowels where this is not evident from the orthography. By the fourth century AD poetry is being regularly written using stress-based metres, suggesting that by this date the distinctions between long and short vowels had been lost, and the pitch accent had been replaced by a stress accent.

Ancient Greek phonology - External evidence

Some ancient grammarians attempt to give systematic descriptions of the sounds of the language. In other authors one can sometimes find occasional remarks about correct pronunciation of certain sounds. However, both types of evidence are often difficult to interpret, because the phonetic terminology of the time was often vague, and it is often not clear in what relation the described forms of the langage stand to those which were actually spoken by different groups of the population.

Important ancient authors include:

• Dionysius Thrax
• Dionysius of Halicarnassus
• Aelius Herodianus

Sometimes the comparison of standard Attic Greek with the written forms of other Greek dialects, or with the humorous renderings of 'alien' dialectal speech (e.g. Spartan Doric) in Attic theatrical works, can provide hints as to the phonetic value of certain spellings.

Towards the end of the 5th century BC, attic authors sometimes transcribe by σ the sound of Spartan θ : ναὶ τὼ σιώ (att. θεώ), παρσένε, ὀρσά (ὀρθή), ἀγασώς (ἀγαθούς) in Aristophanes (Lysistrata) and we also find σύματος (θύματος) in Thukidides with the latter spelling found even in Spartan inscriptions of the fourth century BC. It can be inferred that in Spartan Doric, <θ> was already a fricative (at least in pre-vocalic position) and could be made fun of, since Attic maintained the plosive pronunciation.

The spelling of Greek loanwords in other languages and conversely, the spelling of foreign loanwords in Greek, can provide important hints about pronunciation. However, the evidence is often difficult to interpret or indecisive. It must be noted that the sounds of loanwords are often not taken over identically into the receiving language. Where the receiving language lacks a sound that corresponds exactly to that of the source language, sounds are usually mapped to some other, similar sound.

In this regard, Latin is of great value to the reconstruction of ancient greek phonology because of its close proximity to the Greek world which caused numerous Greek words to be borrowed by the Romans. At first, Greek loanwords denoting technical terms or proper names which contained the letter Φ were imported in Latin with the spelling P or PH, indicating an effort to immitate, albeit imperfectly, a sound that Latin lacked. Later on, in the first centuries AD, spellings with F start to appear in such loanwords, signaling the onset of the fricative pronunciation of Φ. Thus, in the second century AD, Filippus replaces P(h)ilippus. At about the same time, the letter F also begins to be used as a substitute for the letter Θ, for lack of a better choice, indicating that the sound of Greek theta had become a fricative as well.

For the purpose of borrowing certain other Greek words, the Romans added the letters Y and Z to the Latin alphabet, taken directly from the Greek one. These additions are important as they show that the Romans had no symbols to represent the sounds of the letters Υ and Ζ in Greek, which means that in these cases no known sound of Latin can be used to reconstruct the Greek sounds.

The Greek alphabet developed from the older Phoenician alphabet. It may be assumed that the Greeks tended to assign to each Phoenician letter that Greek sound which most closely resembled the Phoenician sound. But, as with loanwords, the interpretation is not straightforward.

The Greek alphabet was in turn the basis of other alphabets, notably the Etruscan and later the Armenian, Gothic, and Cyrillic. Similar arguments can be derived in these cases as in the Phoenician-Greek case.

For example, in Cyrillic, the letter В (ve) stands for [v], confirming that beta was pronounced as a fricative by the 9th century AD, while the new letter Б (be) was invented to note the sound [b]. Conversely, in Gothic, the letter derived from beta stands for [b], so in the 4th century AD, beta was still a plosive in Greek.

Any reconstruction of Ancient Greek needs to take into account how the sounds later developed towards Modern Greek, and how these changes could have occurred. In general, the changes between the reconstructed Ancient Greek and Modern Greek are assumed to be unproblematic in this respect by historical linguists, because all the relevant changes (fricativisation of plosives, chain-shifts of long vowels towards [i], loss of initial [h], restructuring of vowel-length and accentuation systems, etc.) are of types that are cross-linguistically frequently attested and relatively easy to explain.

Systematic relationships between sounds in Greek and sounds in other Indo-European languages are taken as strong evidence for reconstruction by historical linguists, because such relationships prove that these sounds must go back to an inherited sound in the proto-language.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Types of arguments and evidence used in reconstruction", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki