Abstract
This paper investigates the phonological tendency of Ancient Greek to anticipate word-internal aspiration to a word-initial segment (vowel, voiceless stop, or /w/). Special attention is paid to the relationship of this tendency with hiatus resolution. A close look at the philological data shows that several processes of h-anticipation should be distinguished: in particular, various kinds of perceptually-driven leftward migration of aspiration (sporadically lexicalized) must be kept apart from a later synchronic rule that moved h to the new onset when two syllabic nuclei coalesced. The hypothesis that the latter phenomenon could accompany not only vowel coalescence but other types of hiatus resolution as well, including elision and glide-formation, may provide explanation for some hitherto obscure cases. The results of this study also have implications for the theoretical discussion of sporadicity in sound change, as they could provide further evidence for the controversial category of phonetically-conditioned sound change with probabilistic conditioning.
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Articles in the same Issue
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- A synchronic and diachronic analysis of potential dāk 得 in Cantonese
- Down the paths to the past habitual: its historical connections with counterfactual pasts, future in the pasts, iteratives and lexical sources in Ancient Greek
- On the survival of the Spanish absolute construction: a qualitative diachronic study based on a corpus of translations from Latin
- Transient subordinate clauses in Balkan Turkic in its shift to Standard Average European subordination. Dialectal and historical evidence
- An integrated tone box scheme for determining tones in Tai varieties beyond Southwestern Tai: diachronic and synchronic concerns
- Vowel harmony in Rma: a diachronic perspective
- Some remarks on h-anticipation in Ancient Greek
- Book Reviews
- Don Ringe: A historical morphology of English
- Thomas Olander (ed.): The Indo-European language family: A phylogenetic perspective
- Ingrid Paulsen: The emergence of American English as a discursive variety: Tracing enregisterment process in nineteenth-century U.S. newspapers
- Lynn Anthonissen: Individuality in language change
- Sam Wolfe: Syntactic change in French
- Program Review
- IE8.com. IEGPT
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Tomorrow I’ll go (a) shopping: on the history of the Expeditionary Go construction and its relation to the absentive
- A synchronic and diachronic analysis of potential dāk 得 in Cantonese
- Down the paths to the past habitual: its historical connections with counterfactual pasts, future in the pasts, iteratives and lexical sources in Ancient Greek
- On the survival of the Spanish absolute construction: a qualitative diachronic study based on a corpus of translations from Latin
- Transient subordinate clauses in Balkan Turkic in its shift to Standard Average European subordination. Dialectal and historical evidence
- An integrated tone box scheme for determining tones in Tai varieties beyond Southwestern Tai: diachronic and synchronic concerns
- Vowel harmony in Rma: a diachronic perspective
- Some remarks on h-anticipation in Ancient Greek
- Book Reviews
- Don Ringe: A historical morphology of English
- Thomas Olander (ed.): The Indo-European language family: A phylogenetic perspective
- Ingrid Paulsen: The emergence of American English as a discursive variety: Tracing enregisterment process in nineteenth-century U.S. newspapers
- Lynn Anthonissen: Individuality in language change
- Sam Wolfe: Syntactic change in French
- Program Review
- IE8.com. IEGPT