A bit of a mouthful this week in which ‘f’ and ‘th’ sounds are pronounced in succession.
αυθυποβολή = autosuggestion
It is made up of three components: αυτο + υπο + βολή. You might be wondering why or how αυτο has become αυθ but more about that later.
The word came in this headline: Έρευνα: Σε αυθυποβολή οφείλονται οι περισσότερες παρενέργειες του εμβολίου –Τι είναι το nocebo; – “Research: Most vaccine side-effects are due to autosuggestion – What is a nocebo?” Increasingly, Greek publications are making fewer attempts to transliterate some terms into Greek. Twenty years ago, ‘nocebo’ would have been written as νοσίμπο. The μπ in the middle is awkward as it can be pronounced mb or b, so some would be saying nocebo while others would be saying nocembo.
In the article αυθυποβολή is used almost as a synonym of nocebo – negative expectations of illness following the vaccine lead people to imagine that they are having side-effects. As hypochondria is the third national sport in Greece after football and basketball, there will be plenty of nocebo and αυθυποβολή floating around.
But why αυθ instead of αυτο? It has to do with the ancient language where all words beginning with vowels or diphthongs had either a ‘rough’ (δασεία) or a ‘smooth’ (ψιλή) breathing. The same was true of one consonant, rho ‘ρ’. The important one was the δασεία as it signified that the word began with an ‘h’ sound. The ψιλή had no function other than to indicate it was not a δασεία.
What did they look like? Small apostrophes above the initial vowel (or rho). Examples of rough breathings are ἑ, ἁ, ὁ, ἡ, οἱ, αἱ. The last two show that the mark was placed over the second vowel in a diphthong. οἱ gives us οἱ πολλοί – the hoi polloi.
As you can see, the δασεία is a tiny apostrophe resembling the letter C. The ψιλή also looks like a C, only pointing in the other direction: ἀ, ἐ, ὀ.
What was their function? The ψιλή had no function to speak of, whereas (as stated above) the δασεία indicated the word began with a rough breathing or ‘h’. In borrowing words from Greek, English and French have respected this convention as the following examples illustrate:
οἱ πολλοί – hoi polloi
ὕμνος = hymn, anthem
Ἅδης = Hades
ἵππος = horse (hippodrome etc)
ῥέω = flow (rheostat etc)
ὑπό = hypo
ὑπέρ = hyper
None of the above, however, explains the θ in αυθυποβολή. Well, if a prefix ending in a vowel is linked with a word beginning with a vowel, the vowel of the prefix is dropped, so αυτό- would normally become αυτ- as in αυτάρκεια (autarky or self-sufficiency). However, if the second word had a rough breathing in Ancient Greek, the τ changes to θ as in αυθυπαρξία (self-existence) and, our friend, αυθυποβολή.
It happens in other cases too. For example, επί becomes εφ before a word which, historically, began with a rough breathing. επί + ἵππος becomes an adjective, έφιππος, meaning ‘mounted’ as in η έφιππη αστυνομία = the mounted police.
I have probably bored the arse off anyone reading this, so here is a YouTube clip that explains the breathings in simple terms. Please note he is using what is still considered the pronunciation of Attic Greek. Nothing has changed since I was at school where I was taught to say hoi polloi instead of i polli. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4idJeq9PTyQ
Finally, let’s spare a thought for all Greek schoolchildren who, until around 1982, had to endure the torture of learning redundant breathings, acute accents, grave accents and tildes, things that neither Plato nor Euripides ever used. In 1982 the monotonic system was introduced – an acute accent or a simple dot above the stressed syllable. My university adopted the monotonic system in the 60s, about 20 years ahead of the Greece itself!