Ancient Greek phonology: Encyclopedia II - Ancient Greek phonology - Vowels

Ancient Greek phonology - Vowels

Attic Greek phonemicaly contrasted long and short vowels. The vowel inventory of Attic Greek, as reconstructed, contained five short and seven long vowels as distinct phonemes. Their exact pronunciation at any particular period is difficult to establish with precision but the following scheme proposed by Allen (1968) is generally accepted. The following tables show the vowels in IPA notation together with the corresponding letters of the Greek alphabet, as used in classical Attic orthography.

The close front rounded vowels /y/ and /yː/ are both represented in writing by the letter υ (upsilon) irrespective of length. At an earlier date they had been [u] and [uː]. It is difficult to determine with precision when the fronting occurred. It was likely a gradual process with a close central rounded vowel as an intermediate stage. The fronting did not occur in all ancient Greek dialects but was inherited by Koine Greek. The unrounding that produced the modern Greek [i] sound of the letter occurred in Byzantine times, long after the loss of length contrast between long and short upsilon.

/ɛː/ (written as η) may perhaps have been even lower, closer to [æ:].

The short mid vowels are thought to have had a primarily close-mid quality, but may have had open-mid allophones [ɛ] and [ɔ].

The long close-mid vowels /eː/ and /oː/ had a complex history. In some instances, they had earlier been closing diphthongs [ei] and [ou] respectively, and the spellings ει and ου reflect this origin. In other instances, they arose through lengthening of earlier short /e/ and /o/ respectively, compensating for a following consonant or consonant cluster that was lost in pre-alphabetic times. Thus, e.g.: λυθείς, λύουσι for earlier *lutʰents, *luontsi. In yet different instances, /eː/ arises through contraction of <εε> and /oː/ through contraction of <εο>, <οε>, or <oo>, with the uncontracted versions found in the dialects. When the original diphthongs lost their diphthongal pronunciation having become /eː/ and /oː/ probably in pre-classical times, the spellings ει and ου provided a convenient way of representing the new sounds, irrespective of origin. Wherever the digraph spellings ει and ου correspond to original diphthongs they are called "genuine diphthongs", in all other cases they are called "spurious diphthongs".

During or soon after the classical period, both /eː/ and /oː/ were raised towards [iː] and [uː] respectively. /eː/ (ει) thus merged with original /iː/, while /oː/ (ου) took up the empty space of the earlier /uː/ phoneme, which had by that time been fronted to /yː/ (see above). The fact that <υ> was never confused with <ου> indicates that <υ> was fronted before <ου> was raised or that the two sound changes occured simultaneously.

Ancient Greek phonology - Alphabetic representation of the vowels of Attic

The above information about the usage of the vowel letters applies to the classical orthography of Attic, after Athens took over the orthographic conventions of the Ionic alphabet in 403 BCE. In the earlier, traditional Attic orthography there was only a smaller repertoire of vowel symbols: α, ε, ι, ο, and υ. The letters η and ω were still missing. All five vowel symbols could at that stage denote either a long or a short vowel. Moreover, the mid-vowel symbols ε and ο could denote both the open-mid /ɛː, ɔː/ and the close-mid long phonemes /eː, oː/ respectively. The Ionic alphabet brought the new letters η and ω for the one set of long vowels, and the convention of using the digraph spellings ει and ου for the other, leaving simple ε and ο to be used only for the short vowels. However, the remaining vowel letters α, ι and υ continued to be ambiguous between long and short phonemes.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Vowels", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki