Psilosis (/saɪˈloʊsɪs/) is thesound change in which theGreek language lost its consonant sound/h/ during antiquity. The term comes from the Greekψίλωσιςpsílōsis ("smoothing, thinning out")[1] and is related to the Greek term forsmooth breathing (ψιλήpsilḗ), the sign for the absence of initial/h/ in a word. Dialects that have lost/h/ are calledpsilotic.
The linguistic phenomenon is comparable to that ofh-dropping in dialects of Modern English and to the development by which/h/ was lost inlate Latin.
The loss of/h/ happened at different times for various dialects of Greek. The easternIonic dialects, theAeolic dialect ofLesbos, as well as theDoric dialects ofCrete andElis, were already psilotic at the beginning of their written record.[2] InAttic, there was widespread variation in popular speech during the classical period,[3] but the formal standard language retained/h/. This variation continued into the HellenisticKoine.[4]
Alexandrine grammarians codified Greek orthography during the 2nd and 1st centuries BC and introduced the signs for the rough ( ῾ ) and smooth ( ᾿ ) breathings to make the distinction between words with and without initial/h/. However, the grammarians were writing at a time when this distinction was no longer natively mastered by many speakers. By the late Roman and earlyByzantine period,/h/ had been lost in all forms of the language.[5]
The loss of the/h/ is reflected in the development of theGreek alphabet by the change in the function of the lettereta (Η), which first served as the sign of/h/ ("heta") but then, in the psilotic dialects, was reused as the sign of the long vowel/ɛː/.
In thepolytonic orthography that started in theHellenistic period ofAncient Greek, the original/h/ sound, where it used to occur, is represented by adiacritic ( ῾ ), called therough breathing orspiritus asper. This sign is also conventionally used in analogy to the Attic usage when rendering texts from the Ionic dialect, which was already psilotic by the time at which the texts were written. However, for Aeolic texts, the convention is to mark all words as nonaspirated.[6]
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) Also:Teodorsson, Sven T. (1978).The phonology of Attic in the Hellenistic period. Gotenburg.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) | This article about theAncient Greek language is astub. You can help Wikipedia byadding missing information. |
