Ancient Greek converted many initial sounds into aspirates:
/s/ > /h/
/y/ > /h/
/r/ > /rh/
/u/ > /hu/
I find this very curious, it’s not a single pinpoint sound change, it’s like an overriding phenomenon that must have some interesting reason behind it. There’s remarkably no info on this as far as I can tell (which is very limited, I’m not a linguist).
I have Horrock’s History of the Greek Language and its Speakers and I’ll check it when I get home tonight.
When [h] developed in Greek, it was quite understandable that a few sounds merged into it. It was and is an easily uttered and quite weak sound (and often unstable). It was weakly pronounced in ancient Greek and in Latin, and has thereafter disappeared from Greek and from Proto-Romance.
σ has a few different provenances, and σσ a dozen or so! In later Greek many vowels and diphthongs famously developed into i, not all at once and some via a few stages, in the end numbering again some dozen different origins in total. The phoneme inventory is limited in all languages—the speakers must make do with what their language has, and its phonotactics is also limited.
Better, by the way, to mark /j/, as /y/ has a different sound value. Also, ancient Greek didn’t have an anlauting /r/ as such, as we think of it (e.g. as in standard Italian). ῥ- was maybe something like the Welsh rh, and it had developed from earlier *sr- and *wr-.
The name of the author of Greek. A History of the Language and its Speakers is Horrocks, so that no-one will be led astray there.
Yes, I can’t see where Horrocks comments on this. I hoping it would be more like Clacson and Horrocks’s The Blackwell History of the Latin Language, which I recall having a great deal more historical linguistic information.
Well, hard to see how one can be led astray in these days of Google searches and the like, but giving a quick response on the phone while at work doesn’t always lead to prime accuracy.
Thanks for the answers. It did help that you didn’t find any info on the topic, I had already scoured over Woodard’s books on the subject and also didn’t find anything, so I think it’s safe to presume this is an issue that’s been curiously glossed over by linguists, and it wasn’t simply me (an amateur) not being able to find info on it.
As I tried to explain, it’s really a non-issue, so not safe at all to presume that it has been “glossed over by linguists”.