Greek Loanwords in some Aramaic and Armenian transcriptions: graphematic considerations on the 'spiritus asper'

After introducing the problem of the phonological status and graphic notation of the spiritus asper within the Greek tradition, this paper aims at dealing with the east- and southward spread of the spiritus asper through different graphic traditions of adaptation of Greek loanwords in Aramaic and Syriac on the one hand, and in Armenian on the other. The materials here discussed are based on Wasserstein (1993), who studied some examples of Aramaic transcriptions of Greek loanwords, and Butts (2016b, 2016a), who studied the phonological integration of such loans in Syriac, where the Greek spiritus asper is mostly written as an /h/, e.g., ἡνιόχος (heniokhos) = hnywkʾ ‘charioteer’. Furthermore, Harviainen (1976) offered a systematic study on the reflexes of Greek /h/ in several foreign languages, including the seven Armenian loans in which /h/ is preserved and represented with /h/, (e.g. ὕλη = hiuƚ).