Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets wrote:
> On 8 August 2010 23:40, Douglas Koller
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
[snip]
>> But back to "rh". We have "rho", the Greek letter,
>> which they could apparently put and aspiration mark
>> next to to get words like "rhinoceros". As Ray has
>> pointed out many times (rightfully so), we cannot go
>> back in a time machine, though we may make educated
>> guesses, as to what might have been happening
>> phonetically. May I reasonably guess that something in 
>> Ancient Greek is like what's happening in Géarthnuns?
>> 
> Good question. I've always wondered whether the hard
> breathing on the Ancient Greek rho was anything but an
> orthographical oddity...
> 

Well, the ancients didn't use any of them thar diacritics  ;)

They were developed by the Alexandrian grammarians of the 
3rd century BCE (traditionally, indeed, by just one, namely, 
Aristophanes of Byzantion). It appears that they were 
devised principally to guide correct pronunciation of Homer. 
  But it's not until the 2nd century CE that we find them 
being use sporadically in papyri. They became more 
widespread as Greek was learnt as an L2.  Their full use, as 
we commonly find them in printed texts, did not become 
normal till the Byzantine period.

Modern Greek at first used the full Byzantine panoply of 
diacritics, except that it bother with the rough breathing 
on initial rho (in 1982 they were all dropped except for the 
acute accent and the diaeresis).

Now, initial rho was consistently transcribed by the Romans 
as _rh_ and medial double rho by _rrh_ so I think there 
really can be little doubt that they were pronounced [r_h] 
and [rr_h] respectively.

However, it is also clear that this was not phonemic; it's 
an allophonic variation of /r/, just as in English & Welsh 
[p_h] is an allophonic variant of /p/ used in initial 
position (and in Welsh intervocalic /p/ is [pp_h]). So in 
that the hard breathing on initial rho is not phonemic, it 
may be considered an orthographic oddity.  But as the 
diacritics were devised to show the correct pronunciation, 
it ain't - if you see what I mean   ;)

-- 
Ray
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