[B-Greek] rough breathing in Koine times
Eric Weiss
papaweiss1 at yahoo.com
Wed Jul 27 14:51:23 EDT 2005
> Carl Conrad wrote:
>
> It's unclear to me in exactly what sense Malcolm means "preserved." I
> may well be saying the same thing -- I hope more clearly -- in simply
> noting that for those who learned to write Greek in a school, at
> least, spelling tends to be far more conservative than oral usage.
> You might compare English where we write "although" and say "altho."
I assume you're saying/suggesting that writers continued to write AF', OUC, hUF', etc.
(rather than AP', OUK, hUP', etc.) before words with initial vowels/diphthongs with a (now no-
longer-pronounced) rough breathing out of habit and custom - i.e., that is the form of APO, OU,
hUPO, etc., that had preceded the particular word for hundreds of years (when the rough
breathing was pronounced), so this form was retained even long after that following word's
initial initial vowel/diphthong no longer had a pronounced rough breathing. (I.e., the continued
use of these "use with a rough breathing" forms in the NT does NOT prove that in the first
century the rough breathing was still pronounced.)
Eric S. Weiss
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