Did any Ancient Greek words have intervocalic /h/?
Did any Ancient Greek words have intervocalic /h/?
Ancient Greek (some dialects at least) had a phoneme /h/, written with a rough breathing mark on vowels. Did this phoneme ever occur between two vowels, or only word-initially and after consonants?
/h/
Answers from any dialect and any point in time (at least any ones where /h/ still existed, so not Koinē) are appreciated.
/h/
1 Answer
1
The only example of an intervocalic /h/ indicated in writing that I know of is in ταὧς, "peacock", but it's likely that /h/ also occurred in certain cases where there is a morpheme boundary, e.g., ευήμερος, probably pronounced [euhɛːmeros], though the internal /h/ is not represented in writing. (I believe this is supported by the Latin spelling "euhemerus".
Another instance I've seen is ὑὕζω "to hoot" (like an owl does), but that's more onomatopoeia than an actual word. Ταὧς is much more legitimate.
– Draconis
Aug 28 at 22:30
But just to check, is ταὧς Attic? I haven't come across it before, but I'd assume the presence/absence of
/h/ was very time- and dialect-dependent.– Draconis
Aug 28 at 22:36
/h/
@Draconis It's listed in Liddell and Scott as an alternate form of ταώς with no indication that it's anything other than Attic. I've never seen this word in the wild, but I remember coming accross it in some sort of philological work decades ago as being apparently the only example of a Greek word that had an internal rough breathing (other than in compounds). It's been long enough that I cannot remember the book I read that in, but the example was so striking as to stick in my mind.
– varro
Aug 29 at 0:23
@Draconis Oh, and I see now that you probably should look at the link referenced by sumelic in his comment.
– varro
Aug 29 at 0:30
ταώς (with or without spiritus asper) is an Oriental loan word and thus not really relevant for Greek phonology. For the “inner aspiration” Beekes refers to Schwyzer: 219 (not available to me at the moment).
– fdb
Aug 29 at 16:44
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Almost the same: Greek pronunciation, invisible aspiration (my impression is that that question focuses on compound words, and doesn’t seem as broadly scoped in terms of dialect and era, but perhaps you could edit this question to mention the older one)
– sumelic
Aug 29 at 0:13