Rough Breathing in Living Koine

Thank you to all of you for the wonderful information that was shared on this post of mine.

I really appreciate it.

Been following this and very interested for a while.

It seems there was a variation over time with loss of the spiritus asper /h/and conversion of the voiceless aspirated stops φ, θ and χ from /ph/, /th/ and /kh/ to fricatives /f/, /θ/ and /x/ finally ending in the modern Greek pronunciation.

There also seems to have been geographic variation if Aristophanes writing of Laconian dialect is right.

It would appear fair to me that in the first century there was variation in pronunciation across the Greek speaking world and it seems reasonable to use either with or without spiritus asper and voiceless aspirated stops or fricatives.

I can see a lot of pedagogic advantages in teaching the modern Greek pronunciation for a number of reasons. Such as ease of pronunciation, ease of teaching and similarity to modern Greek.

However, my question is as follows – were the aspects of the loss of aspiration all a part of one process? The loss of rough breathing occurring at the same time as the switch from voiceless aspirated stops to fricatives?

If so, should we ONLY pronounce in two ways:-

1) No spiritus asper and φ, θ and χ as /f/, /θ/ and /x/.

OR

2) With spiritus asper and φ, θ and χ as /ph/, /th/ and /kh/

(This is in contrast to the Erasmian pronunciation.)

Do you think this is right? or can we separate these phonological processes?

--- -- I must to preferring option (2) - though I do find pronouncing voiceless stops π, τ, κ at the beginning of a word quite tricky as a English speaker to differentiate between π/φ,τ/θ and κ/χ quite tricky. Teaching this distinction to a class could be even more of a challenge.

I agree. Fortunately, however, this is an easy “fix”. In other words, just choose to add it to your speech but don’t get on students if they don’t follow it due to recordings/material. That would actually simulate the first century situation quite nicely. In fact, the more I look at this the more I think we should use spiritus asper. I might try to adjust my pronunciation to include it now. I recently surveyed all the evidence I could find on this and my conclusion was that spiritus asper persisted in the speech of some and had fallen out of the speech of some by the first century in Palestine. We have evidence of both.

Thanks for posting the question here also so that everyone could benefit from it.

It is not entirely clear when rough breathing fell out of the language in Palestine, though Egyptian evidence suggests that it fell out of pronunciation in the Koine period. This is evidenced by the following sort of spelling errors (Gignac 1976, 134):

μετ᾽ ὄρκου (instead of μεθ᾽ ὅρκου) (PMich. 123 V, IV.13-14,21 (45–47 CE))

ἐπ᾽ οἶς (instead of ἐφ᾽ οἷς) (PMich. 322a.38 (46 CE))

For Palestine, we may not have enough evidence on this particular question, though I am continuing to research it. One possible piece of evidence that it stayed around for some time is the Hebrew rendering of Greek συνέδριον as סנהדרין (sanhedrin) which has an etymological rough breathing in the middle of the word (ἕδριον), though that may have only been preserved because it was in the middle of a word. Word-medial sounds are more likely to be preserved than word-initial sounds.

Therefore, it is likely that rough breathing had been lost in Palestinian Koine in the Koine period, though we do not have enough evidence to say for sure. There is some evidence which might suggest otherwise, such as two or three Greek loanwords in the Mishnah, 'sanhedrin' being one of them. Shai Heijmans has written an excellent Ph.D. thesis on Greek loanwords in the Mishnah in which he discusses this.

Hope this helps!

Ben Παῦλος