Ancient Greek – Phonology, Part 1
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Beek, Lucien van
Huitink, Luuk
Introduction to the segmental phonology of Ancient Greek.
 Hello there and welcome to the first presentation about ancient Greek phonology. My name is Lucien van Beek. I teach and do research at Leiden University and I currently have a project called Unrevelling Homer's Language about historical linguistic developments in the language of Homer. Today we will introduce segmental phonology. Here's what we're going to do. We will start with the consonants and then cover the vowels and diphthongs. We will also discuss the phonetic realisation of certain phonemes, but accentuation will be treated in the second phonology presentation. So let's start with the plosives. In Attic Greek they have one of three different places of articulation. Labial, dental or velar. They also have one of three ways of articulation. Voiceless, voiced or aspirated. This yields a total of nine plosives. There are two nasals, m and n, erotic, r, and lateral liquid l. Furthermore, Attic Greek has a dental fricative and a glottal fricative. As in many languages, the glottal fricative occurs only in word initial position. Finally, there is the sound represented with the letter zeta. It was originally an adfricate dz, but there are indications that it had been metathasized into zd in 5th century Attic, and in that case it would not be a separate phoneme. It further developed into a voiced fricative z during the 4th century. In this series, Luc and I will stick to the traditional pronunciation dz. Although ancient Greek is no longer spoken, various kinds of evidence are available for determining the phonetic realisation of what is written. I will now illustrate this with the aspirated plosives. The letters theta, phi and chi represent voiceless plosives pronounced with simultaneous aspiration. This feature aspiration distinguishes them from the unaspirated voiceless plosives, t, p and k. We know about the pronunciation of these sounds from at least three sorts of evidence. First of all, ancient authors who wrote about pronunciation used the term dasu, rough, for aspirated plosives, as opposed to psilon, smooth, for unaspirated voiceless plosives. A second type of indication is language internal. For instance, in elided prepositions, voiceless plosives become aspirated if the following word starts with a rough breathing, as in aphalos, from the sea. In the third place, early loanwords from Greek into Latin render these sounds as plain voiceless stops, as in the second plosive of Latin purpura, purple snail, borrowed from Greek porfura. This means that aspirates had not yet developed at the time of borrowing into voiceless fricatives, which is still the modern Greek pronunciation. The first evidence for a fricative pronunciation is from the first century of the common era in Italy. All consonant phonemes, except for dze and he, may occur as geminates, or consonants of double length. Some very frequent words have a geminate, such as hippos, horse, or annea, nain. However, with the exception of geminate l, m, r, and t, geminates are relatively rare. That consonant length was phonologically distinctive is proven by the minimal pairs shown here. Let's consider the final example. While echaluptonmen is the augmented imperfect first plural of calupto to conceal, the form echaluptonmen with a geminate belongs to the compound verb echalupto with the exact opposite meaning to reveal. As the verb form echaluptonmen illustrates, geminates may result from internal sandy with preverbs. Other examples of geminates resulting in this way are elepo from enlepo and susiteo from susiteo. In both cases, a codonazle has been assimilated to the following onset. Note that there are also geminated voiceless aspirates, but they are conventionally represented with a sequence of a voiceless plus an aspirated plosive grapheme, as in the name sapo. A case where ancient Greek is of particular typological interest is r, the rotic, together with its geminated counterpart. It was probably realized as an alveolar trill. In word initial position, it is written in a special way with an aspiration mark, both in the manuscript tradition and in inscriptions. By the way, in some archaic inscriptions we find cases of other initial resonance receiving an aspiration mark, but the habit persisted only with rho. It's debated what the exact phonetics underlying this notation are. Scholars have argued either for a voiceless trill or a pre-aspirated one. In compounds and augmented forms, that is, in internal sandy, word initial rho normally appears as a geminus. An example is the augmented imperfect rhe of the verb rheo to flow. The phonetic length of this sandy product is a by-effect of the voicelessness or pre-aspiration of the word initial rho. Let's now move on to the attic vowels. Proto-Greek had a simple and typologically common system with five short vowels, a, e, o, u, and five corresponding long vowels, akin to the system of classical Latin. The triangle on this slide depicts the attic system, which has undergone several changes with respect to that of Proto-Greek. One salient feature is that original short and long u have been fronted to u. The other short vowels, shown in the middle triangle, remained the same. The long vowel system, however, on the outer triangle, was affected by several further developments. The systemic gap left by the fronting of long u to long u was filled again when long o was raised to u. This happened relatively late, but before the mid-fourth century BCE. The long vowel a reflects common Greek a after the sounds e, i, and r, but it also occurs as a product of various contractions of crazes, which is a sandy phenomenon that will be treated in the phonology section part 3, and it also arose from the so-called second and third compensatory lengthenings. Now, the long mid vowels are a more complicated topic. Attic preserves the long vowels e and o that were inherited from Proto-Greek. They are spelled with the letters eta and omega in the Ionic alphabet, which was introduced in 403 BCE, and is used in our textural editions, as was explained in Introduction Part 3. These long vowels take part in upload alternations with the short vowels e and o, as I will explain in Part 1 of morphology. Moreover, long e may also reflect a common Greek long a if this was not followed by one of the sounds e, i, or r. The number of long vowels in Attic and in many other Greek dialects was increased with long e and long o, and the letter was then raised to u, as just explained in classical Attic. In the Ionic alphabet, these vowels are spelled with epsilon iota and omicron ipsilon respectively. Long e and u are secondary long vowels, which at first arose from two different processes, compensatory lengthening of the short vowels e and o, as well as contractions. An example of compensatory lengthening is ectena, I killed, where the a-riss marker s was united and subsequently lost. An example of contraction is egenu, you were born from egeneo, where the final u arose from e plus o. Later on, during the 6th or 5th century, the inherited diphthongs a and o were manoftangais, leading to a merger with the secondary long vowels e and o. After this merger, the spellings epsilon iota and omicron ipsilon, which had originally been reserved for the diphthongs, were generalized to denote all cases of secondary long vowels. Instances of secondary long vowels that arose from contraction or compensatory lengthening never were diphthongs, but they are spelled as diphthongs in the Ionic alphabet. Hence, they are sometimes referred to as spurious diphthongs. Let us now focus in more detail on the diphthongs. Ancient Greek had only falling diphthongs, consisting of a short vowel plus a semi-vowel je or we. Note that in Attic Greek, these semi-vowels had been lost from the language altogether except in these positions. They can therefore be viewed as allophones of the vowel phonemes i and o. The seven normal diphthongs and six long diphthongs are presented here, together with their graph themes. As just explained, a and o were actually no longer diphthongs in 4th century Attic. So that is here and here. Hence the asterisk. Long diphthongs occur only with a vocally element a, e or o, not with the secondary long vowels a and o. Generally speaking, diphthongs may occur not only before consonants, as in lepe, but also before vowels, as in ae. Long diphthongs can be viewed as intrusive in the system. They are mostly due to certain sound changes and morphophonological processes. They occur in augmented forms, like eukato, he prayed, also in forms with crazes, such as tau-to from tau-auto. Then we find them in forms that arose by contraction, such as oide, singing, from a oide, and finally in the date of singular endings, ae and oi. In the next video, we will discuss ancient Greek accentuation. I hope this video gives you a good idea about the segments of ancient Greek and about the complicated developments affecting the long vowels. Thank you for your attention.
 Hello there and welcome to the first presentation about ancient Greek phonology.  My name is Lucien van Beek.  I teach and do research at Leiden University and I currently have a project called Unrevelling  Homer's Language about historical linguistic developments in the language of Homer.  Today we will introduce segmental phonology.  Here's what we're going to do.  We will start with the consonants and then cover the vowels and diphthongs.  We will also discuss the phonetic realisation of certain phonemes, but accentuation will  be treated in the second phonology presentation.  So let's start with the plosives.  In Attic Greek they have one of three different places of articulation.  Labial, dental or velar.  They also have one of three ways of articulation.  Voiceless, voiced or aspirated.  This yields a total of nine plosives.  There are two nasals, m and n, erotic, r, and lateral liquid l.  Furthermore, Attic Greek has a dental fricative and a glottal fricative.  As in many languages, the glottal fricative occurs only in word initial position.  Finally, there is the sound represented with the letter zeta.  It was originally an adfricate dz, but there are indications that it had been metathasized  into zd in 5th century Attic, and in that case it would not be a separate phoneme.  It further developed into a voiced fricative z during the 4th century.  In this series, Luc and I will stick to the traditional pronunciation dz.  Although ancient Greek is no longer spoken, various kinds of evidence are available for  determining the phonetic realisation of what is written.  I will now illustrate this with the aspirated plosives.  The letters theta, phi and chi represent voiceless plosives pronounced with simultaneous aspiration.  This feature aspiration distinguishes them from the unaspirated voiceless plosives, t,  p and k.  We know about the pronunciation of these sounds from at least three sorts of evidence.  First of all, ancient authors who wrote about pronunciation used the term dasu, rough, for  aspirated plosives, as opposed to psilon, smooth, for unaspirated voiceless plosives.  A second type of indication is language internal.  For instance, in elided prepositions, voiceless plosives become aspirated if the following  word starts with a rough breathing, as in aphalos, from the sea.  In the third place, early loanwords from Greek into Latin render these sounds as plain voiceless  stops, as in the second plosive of Latin purpura, purple snail, borrowed from Greek porfura.  This means that aspirates had not yet developed at the time of borrowing into voiceless fricatives,  which is still the modern Greek pronunciation.  The first evidence for a fricative pronunciation is from the first century of the common era  in Italy.  All consonant phonemes, except for dze and he, may occur as geminates, or consonants  of double length.  Some very frequent words have a geminate, such as hippos, horse, or annea, nain.  However, with the exception of geminate l, m, r, and t, geminates are relatively rare.  That consonant length was phonologically distinctive is proven by the minimal pairs  shown here.  Let's consider the final example.  While echaluptonmen is the augmented imperfect first plural of calupto to conceal, the form  echaluptonmen with a geminate belongs to the compound verb echalupto with the exact opposite  meaning to reveal.  As the verb form echaluptonmen illustrates, geminates may result from internal sandy with  preverbs.  Other examples of geminates resulting in this way are elepo from enlepo and susiteo from  susiteo.  In both cases, a codonazle has been assimilated to the following onset.  Note that there are also geminated voiceless aspirates, but they are conventionally represented  with a sequence of a voiceless plus an aspirated plosive grapheme, as in the name sapo.  A case where ancient Greek is of particular typological interest is r, the rotic, together  with its geminated counterpart.  It was probably realized as an alveolar trill.  In word initial position, it is written in a special way with an aspiration mark, both  in the manuscript tradition and in inscriptions.  By the way, in some archaic inscriptions we find cases of other initial resonance receiving  an aspiration mark, but the habit persisted only with rho.  It's debated what the exact phonetics underlying this notation are.  Scholars have argued either for a voiceless trill or a pre-aspirated one.  In compounds and augmented forms, that is, in internal sandy, word initial rho normally  appears as a geminus.  An example is the augmented imperfect rhe of the verb rheo to flow.  The phonetic length of this sandy product is a by-effect of the voicelessness or pre-aspiration  of the word initial rho.  Let's now move on to the attic vowels.  Proto-Greek had a simple and typologically common system with five short vowels, a, e,  o, u, and five corresponding long vowels, akin to the system of classical Latin.  The triangle on this slide depicts the attic system, which has undergone several changes  with respect to that of Proto-Greek.  One salient feature is that original short and long u have been fronted to u.  The other short vowels, shown in the middle triangle, remained the same.  The long vowel system, however, on the outer triangle, was affected by several further  developments.  The systemic gap left by the fronting of long u to long u was filled again when long o was  raised to u.  This happened relatively late, but before the mid-fourth century BCE.  The long vowel a reflects common Greek a after the sounds e, i, and r, but it also occurs  as a product of various contractions of crazes, which is a sandy phenomenon that will be treated  in the phonology section part 3, and it also arose from the so-called second and third  compensatory lengthenings.  Now, the long mid vowels are a more complicated topic.  Attic preserves the long vowels e and o that were inherited from Proto-Greek.  They are spelled with the letters eta and omega in the Ionic alphabet, which was introduced  in 403 BCE, and is used in our textural editions, as was explained in Introduction Part 3.  These long vowels take part in upload alternations with the short vowels e and o, as I will explain  in Part 1 of morphology.  Moreover, long e may also reflect a common Greek long a if this was not followed by one  of the sounds e, i, or r.  The number of long vowels in Attic and in many other Greek dialects was increased with  long e and long o, and the letter was then raised to u, as just explained in classical  Attic.  In the Ionic alphabet, these vowels are spelled with epsilon iota and omicron ipsilon respectively.  Long e and u are secondary long vowels, which at first arose from two different processes,  compensatory lengthening of the short vowels e and o, as well as contractions.  An example of compensatory lengthening is ectena, I killed, where the a-riss marker  s was united and subsequently lost.  An example of contraction is egenu, you were born from egeneo, where the final u arose  from e plus o.  Later on, during the 6th or 5th century, the inherited diphthongs a and o were manoftangais,  leading to a merger with the secondary long vowels e and o.  After this merger, the spellings epsilon iota and omicron ipsilon, which had originally  been reserved for the diphthongs, were generalized to denote all cases of secondary long vowels.  Instances of secondary long vowels that arose from contraction or compensatory lengthening  never were diphthongs, but they are spelled as diphthongs in the Ionic alphabet.  Hence, they are sometimes referred to as spurious diphthongs.  Let us now focus in more detail on the diphthongs.  Ancient Greek had only falling diphthongs, consisting of a short vowel plus a semi-vowel  je or we.  Note that in Attic Greek, these semi-vowels had been lost from the language altogether  except in these positions.  They can therefore be viewed as allophones of the vowel phonemes i and o.  The seven normal diphthongs and six long diphthongs are presented here, together with their graph  themes.  As just explained, a and o were actually no longer diphthongs in 4th century Attic.  So that is here and here.  Hence the asterisk.  Long diphthongs occur only with a vocally element a, e or o, not with the secondary long vowels  a and o.  Generally speaking, diphthongs may occur not only before consonants, as in lepe, but also  before vowels, as in ae.  Long diphthongs can be viewed as intrusive in the system.  They are mostly due to certain sound changes and morphophonological processes.  They occur in augmented forms, like eukato, he prayed, also in forms with crazes, such  as tau-to from tau-auto.  Then we find them in forms that arose by contraction, such as oide, singing, from a oide, and finally  in the date of singular endings, ae and oi.  In the next video, we will discuss ancient Greek accentuation.  I hope this video gives you a good idea about the segments of ancient Greek and about the  complicated developments affecting the long vowels.  Thank you for your attention.
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