Why is the spelling "eureka" by far more preferable to "heureka" in English? Greek vocabularies give "heureka" for the perfect to "heurisko".
Learn English – Why do we spell “eureka”, not “heureka”
aspirationetymologygreekorthography
Related Solutions
The reason? A man by the name of Noah Webster, who wrote America's blue-backed spellers, and her first dictionary.
Noah Webster, was an English spelling reformer, and one of the chief advocates of English spelling reformers is that spelling should change alongside pronunciations :
Pronunciations change gradually over time and the alphabetic principle that lies behind English (and every other alphabetically written language) gradually becomes corrupted. If the maintenance of regularity in the orthography of English is desired, then spelling needs to be amended to account for the changes.
This change was made along with many different words (e.g. colour to color, grey to gray, -ise to -ize)
"Sceptical" changed to "skeptical" due to Noah Webster's spelling reforming efforts, basically.
As user2922582’s answer says, use of the spelling “myrrh” in English is related to the use of the spelling “myrrhe” in French. The “rrh” in both of these goes back to the Latin form “myrrha”, which is a transliteration of Greek “μύρρα”.
The H occurs in the transliteration because of the double R. The general pattern for spelling /r/ in words taken from Greek is “rh” at the start of words, “r” in consonant clusters, and either “r” (for single “ρ”) or “rrh” (for double “ρρ”) between vowels (or word-finally after a vowel because of the loss of a final vowel in an Anglicized form, as in this case). “Mary” and “Maria” don’t have an H after the R because they have only a single R that isn’t the first letter in either of the names.
The Greek “rough breathing” corresponds to H
It’s true that the standard form of the Greek alphabet1 does not contain a letter corresponding to H, but Greek written with polytonic orthography has a number of diacritics. The use of H in the transliteration of Greek words is related to “breathings”, not accent marks. Outside of the digraphs PH, TH and CH, H usually corresponds to a “rough breathing” diacritical mark in Greek.
This diacritical mark was used primarily on vowels at the start of words. It always occurs at the start of a word before the vowel Y; other vowels could take either a “rough breathing” or a “smooth breathing” (indicating the absence of /h/).
In addition, in some texts written in polytonic Greek orthography, the letter rho (corresponding to Latin R) was written with a rough breathing in certain contexts: at the start of a word, and in the middle of the word when it came directly after another rho.
This convention is explained in Nick Nicholas’s answer to the following Quora question: When was it a rule that double rhos (Greek letters - ῤῥ) should be written with smooth and rough breathing marks and when did the rule change?
Nicholas says the following (rearranged so that it fits better with the flow of this answer):
Allen’s Vox Graeca (p. 39) [mentions the evidence and refers to] writing ῤῥ as a Byzantine practice, and it is of course corroborated in the Latin transliteration <rrh> (e.g. Pyrrhus = Πύῤῥος).
The ῤῥ orthography reflects a phonological reality of Classical Greek, that the second rho in a pair was voiceless, something attested in Herodian.
[this practice] had dropped out of use in Modern Greek early in the 20th century. As in fact had the initial rough breathing on rho.
The ῤῥ orthography used to be regular in Western typography, but has long since fallen out of use; from memory, it was routine in early 19th century editions of Classical texts, and rare by late 19th century editions.
In other words, this convention is thought to be based on some phenomenon of using a “aspirated” (in terms of phonetics, possibly just devoiced) sound for rho in certain positions in Classical Greek accents (although in modern Greek there is no difference between aspirated and unaspirated /r/ sounds). And because the conventional way of Latinizing rho with a rough breathing is the digraph “rh”, the conventional way of Latinizing double rho in words from Greek has been “rrh”. See the following blog post on John Wells's phonetic blog: rh and rrh
The word “myrrh”
Apparently the Semitic source of the Greek word μύρρα had a geminate/double/long r (Wiktionary references Arabic murr). The pronunciation of one of the derived Greek words is reconstructed as something like /myrra/ [myr̊r̊a] (in Classical Attic Greek older [u] was fronted to [y]), which was spelled as μύρρα, which was Latinized as myrrha.
The form “murra”, which was spelled without an H, was also used in Latin (in fact, “murra” was apparently the preferred form and spelling of the word in Classical Latin), and the Oxford English Dictionary indicates that “murr-” spellings were used from Old English up into Middle English. So the use of H in the English spelling of this word was inconsistent in the past. There have also been variant spellings with I, as is fairly common for words with the vowel Y from Greek [y].
But the modern standard spelling in English has become fixed as “myrrh”, just as the modern standard spelling in French has become fixed as “myrrhe” (the CNRTL indicates that in the past, alternative spellings like “mirre” existed in French).
- There are many variant Greek alphabets that were used in ancient times.
Best Answer
In summary, my hypothesis is that certain translators transliterated the Greek letters but not the accents, and thereby lost the [h], because initial [h] is only a small mark above the vowel. They may have done so because their Greek was not very good, or because they did not consider the [h] mark a real letter worth transliterating.
The Greek word εὕρηκα was pronounced [hěu̯rɛːka] in classical Greek; the [h] is indicated by the spiritus asper ("rough breathing"), the tiny "c" above the ὑ. (The other accent, the acutus, indicates increasing pitch; note that the spiritus asper came from a tiny left half of the Greek letter H, which was used in some older dialects to denote an [h] sound.)
Many, perhaps most Greek words came to English through Latin. However, the Latin transliteration of εὕρηκα would be heureca, or possibly eureca. My own, quick research in the Bibliotheca Teubneriana Latina suggests that the great majority of Roman writers transcribed the spiritus asper as h, but a significant minority did not. In any case, neither heureca nor eureca exists in the BTL; therefore I suspect that the word was not the famous expression in Rome that it is now.
The earliest mention of Archimedes' exclamation is by Vitruvius (De Architectura IX, preface 10), and later usage is most probably all based on him. Both the Perseus Digital Library, whose edition of Vitrivius is based on the 1912 Teubner, and the edition by C. Fensterbusch (Darmstadt 1964/76) give the word in Greek letters. Perseus/Teubner give the Greek with accents, Fensterbusch without.
The first use of the word recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1570:
Notice that the word is given in Greek capitals, without accents.
(The square brackets may indicate either something added by editors in a quotation (unlikely, because that only applies to parts of quoted sentences), or a "spurious" entry in the dictionary, which is a word that erroneously found its way into other dictionaries while in fact it was never used (just as unlikely). I conclude that the brackets either indicate nothing of relevance or that this is a dubious quotation.)
By the 19th century, eureka seems to have prevailed. Before that, as it can be seen, various versions were used. Several editions did not print the breathing mark: perhaps this caused readers who were not well versed in Greek to translate the Greek letters one by one into the most similar English letters, disregarding conventions; this would give eureka. A commenter on Languagehat gives the following for the editions of Fielding also quoted in the OED:
This might suggest that the spelling eureka did indeed originate in a letter-by-letter transliteration of the Greek into similar English letters by someone who didn't know the traditional convention of using c for Greek κ: Fielding feared that his version Eureka might seem illiterate and changed it into Heureka in the third edition.
In the time of Vitruvius (1st century BC), the spiritus was most probably not yet in use, so that plain unaccented Greek letters would have been written. It would have been capitals, because Greek minuscules were probably not yet used either. (Note that we cannot be sure that the Greek wasn't added later by monks and that Vitruvius himself didn't use Latin letters.) In the edition by Fensterbusch mentioned above, the Greek letters printed without spiritus too. This might support my theory. But we would really need to compare many more editions from various dates.
So nothing is certain. Before the 19th century, transliterations of Greek words that were not used in Latin varied wildly—if not of other Greek words, then certainly of this one. The reason why it eventually became eureka in modern English, Dutch, and French, as opposed to heureka in German, could be any arbitrary circumstance, though I have a feeling that the German version is relatively new as compared to ours. In the edition of De Architectura below, printed in 1567 in Venice, the word is written in Latin letters as eurica:
This shows how varied transliterations were in the 16th century. The i can probably be explained by the fact that it was printed in Italy. But here is the Latin edition of Giambattista della Porta's Magia Naturalis from 1597 (the English version is in the OED's quotation from 1658 above):
It was printed in Frankfurt, and eureka is given in Greek, with spiritus. Another Latin edition of the same work, printed in Naples in 1589, uses the aspirated Greek too (scanned image no. 302 / printed page 285, at the bottom).