[B-Greek] rough breathing in the 1st century
Randall Buth
randallbuth at gmail.com
Wed Sep 13 12:10:47 EDT 2006
>Everything I've read says that the "rough breathing" was no longer
used or sounded by
the 1st century (i.e., NT times). Yet we still see elided
prepositions differentiated by
whether or not the initial vowel of the word they precede has a
rough or smooth
breathing. If there was no longer an initial "h" sound, why did,
e.g., EF' (for EPI) and
AF' (for APO) persist instead of EP' and AP', etc., being used
before all vowel-initial
words? I.e., why is it AF' hAMARTIAS and AP' AGGELOU, and not AP'
hAMARTIAS/AGGELOU? Why is there still OUK and OUC, and not just OUK?
Eric S. Weiss>
They are historical collocations, preserving the memory of where the
dasu-fthongos/dasu-pneuma was.
(On historical fossils, why do we have a word like 'ruthless' when we
no longer have a word 'ruth'? why do US folk say 'ben' when they spell
the word "been"?)
It is also possible that some schools at the time artifically
preserved a reading tradition for poetry that included breathing,
length, and tone. So that the knowledge was not completely gone.
Blessings
Randall Buth
--
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη πληθυνθείη
שלום לכם וברכות
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
randallbuth at gmail.com
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