Reflexes of *r̥ in the Alphabetic Dialects

This chapter discusses and evaluates the evidence for the regular outcome of *r̥ in the alphabetic Greek dialects other than Ionic-Attic.1 The first aim is to determine under which conditions and in which dialects o-colored reflexes are regular. There is currently no consensus on this matter. The case for a-colored reflexes in dialects like Arcadian and Cypriot has been overstated: Morpurgo Davies (1968), though an influential treatment, suffers from a lack of clarity about Pan-Greek developments that yielded ‐αρ‐ at an early date, such as those involving laryngeals. This issue has been clarified by previous scholars (García Ramón 1985, Haug 2002) andwill not be discussed in all its details here. The second main aim is to determine, for each dialect, the regular place of the anaptyctic vowel. Surprisingly, only few previous discussions have paid attention to this issue: themain focus is usually on determining the vowel color of the regular reflex. There is a broadly-shared presupposition that the apparent hesitation between ‐αρ‐ and ‐ρα‐ in Ionic-Attic was also characteristic of other Greek dialects. In fact, some scholars suppose that in most lexemes the place of the anaptyctic shwawas fixed already in Proto-Greek; this shwawould have merged with /a/ or /o/ later, depending on the dialect and in some cases on further phonetic conditioning factors. However, in the previous chapter we encountered examples where the dialects have a diverging vowel slot in the same etymon, e.g. Hom. τέτρατος, Thess. πετροτος ‘fourth’ as opposed to Ion.Att. τέταρτος, Arc. τετορτος.Moreover, we have seen that the regularMycenaean reflex of *r̥ was either ‐or‐ or preserved ‐r̥‐, and that there is no need to assume