--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "P&G" <petegray@...> wrote:
> >Had "Old Greek" a voiceless aspirated alveolar trill?
>
> Vox Graeca refers to two grammarians (well, all right, one
grammarian and
> Plato) who describe what seems to be a trilled, alveolar sound.
>
> W S Allen says "Generally speaking [r] is a voiced sound, but in
certain
> environments in calssical Attic it seems to have been voiceless."
He bases
> this on:
> (a) descriptions at the time
> (b) the Byzantine tradition of breathings (with which I assume you
are
> familiar)
> (c) dialect spelling variations
> (d) an Armenian loan word
> (e) modern Tsakonian
> He points to modern Iceland where a voiceless alveolar trill is
phonemic,
> and contrasts with voiced ones.
> He suggests the r was also voiceless in sequences such as thr, phr,
chr.
>
> The aspiration is usually etymological, but not always. (Initial r
in Greek
> never comes from PIE initial *r)
Interesting information, Peter. Thank you very much for writing it
out for me.
> Modern Greek has only a voiced r
(Somewhat random: I've noticed a few other errors on one site that
I've perused lately, but their Greek page listing just a flap -
http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/nl-ipa/greekipa.html - seems
especially questionable.)
Would you say the same holds true for other dialects, such as Aeolic,
or would you say it was always unaspirated in Aeolic?
The thing is, I always wondered about Greek-to-Latin
transliteration. It seems Greek Rs were written with a mark above
them that one book of mine denotes as an aspiration mark. When
transliterated into Latin, sometimes an H was written if at the
beginning of a word, sometimes not (risus, for example). As well,
double R within words becomes rrh for some odd reason (but never
rhrh). ? I would think between vowels, especially, it would be
voiced. Or maybe it's just a matter of aspiration. I suppose the
choices for these environments would be:
- voiceless aspirated alveolar trill
- voiceless unaspirated alveolar trill (if that's even possible)
- voiced aspirated alveolar trill
- voiced unaspirated alveolar trill (Modern Greek)
?
And then there's the whole matter of some placenames and proper names
in Latin that aren't derived from Greek yet have RHs (Rhea Silvia,
Rhoetus, Rhegium, Rhaeti, Rhenus, Rhodanus, etc.)... somewhat of
another question entirely, but I'm still curious. Another word I
noticed that didn't seem to be from Greek was rheno/reno. What would
be the explanation for that?