Jah Qaþ sa Juhiza du Attin:
The Gothic Spirants and the Pronunciation of Koine Greek

William D. White (University of Colorado, Boulder)

The Koine of the Hellenistic and Roman periods stands between Classical and Early Medieval Greek, bridging the old Indo-European pronunciation of aspirated stops and the spirants of the modern language. It has been notoriously difficult to assign a date to when this transition occurred, hampered in no small part by the fact the epigraphical evidence of the many dialects indicate a mélange of articulations for Phi, Chi, and Theta already existed across the Greek world and endured for centuries after Alexander’s empire gave a standard form to the written language. Scholarly consensus thus far maintains that by the 3^rd century AD, the spirants had overtaken the older aspirates as the accepted manner of speech, as reflected in Greek transliterations of Hebrew terms in early Christian works, as well as how Greek words were adapted into the Latin alphabet by late Roman authors.

This evidence is based on the comparison of languages and alphabets which themselves were changing, such as with Vulgar Latin’s drift away from the classical towards the early Romance dialects, and as such cannot firmly fix an entirely subjective basis for assessment.

However, at a date when traditional thinking has assigned a spirantic value to the Greek aspirates, an entirely new system is sprung from the mind of the Gothic bishop Wulfilas, who invented the Gothic alphabet in his magnum opus, a Gothic version of the New Testament by which to spread Christianity in hopes of pacifying their warlike tendencies. And it is here of particular note that Wulfilas, when crafting letters for the sounds *θ, *f, and *χ, present in the Gothic language with the values possessed by the Modern Greek spirants, he did not choose the Greek letters which supposedly by this time had the same sounds and instead chose Þ, F, and H, inventing the first and taking the other from the Latin alphabet.

Based on Greek transliteration present in the Gothic Bible of Wulfilas, as well as the forms of the Gothic alphabet in comparison with the Latin and Greek of c. 325AD, this paper shall endeavor to demonstrate that the pronunciation of Koine Greek in the early days of the Eastern Roman Empire was more conservative and classical than is typically accredited it. As indicated by the level of Wulfilas’ education in the city of Byzantium itself, such an academic and intentional venture is otherwise difficult to explain merely in light of epigraphical and comparative linguistic substantiation.