Hello friends! I'm working on a very extreme adaptation of many Greek works as a dramaturgy assistant. The playwright found a "transliteration" of the Sphinx's riddle from Oedipus and the Sphinx but I can't find where this text came from, or any specifics about it. Any Greek speakers or grecophiles have any footholds? Many thanks in advance!
"annerfit kee bose"
In the playwright's words:
Somewhere, when I was doing research on Oedipus and the Sphinx, I think I found a transliteration of Greek connected to that story, and I think that’s what these words represent. But that research is lost, and I haven’t been able to find it again.
(Possibly: ανηρφιτ κ βος
ανερφιτ κ βος
ανηρφιτ κ βως
ανερφιτ κ βως)
To my knowledge there is no play titled Oedipus and the Sphinx. You may be thinking of Sophocles' Oidipous (often styled "Oedipus Tyrannus" or "Oedipus Rex") which only refers indirectly to the Sphinx's riddle. There is another indirect reference in Euripides' Phoenician Women, but neither actually quotes the riddle.
For the text of the Sphinx' riddle, we have a couple of sources, though they're not the most accessible ones. All of these show the riddle to be much longer than the 3 words you've cited here, which I can't make sense of. In Apollodorus 3.5.8, we find this text:
τί ἐστιν ὃ μίαν ἔχον φωνὴν τετράπουν καὶ δίπουν καὶ τρίπουν γίνεται:
Ti estin ho mian ekhon fônên tetrapoun kai dipoun kai tripoun ginetai?
"What is it that, though having one voice, becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?"
This is the prose version of the riddle as it comes down to us. The same riddle is also preserved in verse, which is much longer. I can't find a Greek text online that I can copy-paste, but it's recorded in Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae 10.81 and the Anthologiae Palatinae 14.64, as well as in numerous scholiasts on the plays mentioned above. The translation runs like this:
There walks on land a creature of two feet, of four feet, and of three; it has one voice, but, sole among the animals that grow on land or in the sky or beneath the sea, it change its nature; nay, when it walks propped on most feet, then is the speed in its limbs less than it has ever been before.
I hope this can help you find the text you're looking for!