Linguistic variation in Classical Attic

EnCyCLOpEdiA Of AnCiEnt GrEEK LAnGuAGE

And LinGuiStiCSVolume 2

G–O

General EditorGeorgios K. Giannakis

Associate EditorsVit Bubenik

Emilio Crespo Chris Golston

Alexandra Lianeri Silvia Luraghi

Stephanos Matthaios

LEidEn • BOStOn2014

This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV

table of Contents

Volume one

introduction .................................................................................................................................................... viiList of Contributors ....................................................................................................................................... xitable of Contents ordered by thematic Category ............................................................................... xvtranscription, Abbreviations, Bibliography ........................................................................................... xxiList of illustrations ......................................................................................................................................... xxiiiArticles A–F ..................................................................................................................................................... 1

Volume two

transcription, Abbreviations, Bibliography ........................................................................................... viiArticles G–o .................................................................................................................................................... 1

Volume three

transcription, Abbreviations, Bibliography ........................................................................................... viiArticles p–Z ...................................................................................................................................................... 1index .................................................................................................................................................................. 547


364 linguistic correctness (hellēnismós), ancient theories of

Sluiter, Ineke. 2000. “Language and thought in Stoic philoso-phy”. In: Auroux et al. I 1.1, 375–384.

Swain, Simon. 1996. Hellenism and empire. Language, classi-cism, and power in the Greek world AD 50–250. Oxford.

Temporini, Hildegard and Wolfgang Haase, eds. 1993. Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt (ANRW). Geschichte und Kultur Roms im Spiegel der neueren Forschung. Berlin – New York.

Versteegh, Kees. 1987. “Latinitas, hellenismos, ‘Arabiyya’”. In: The history of linguistics in the Classical period, ed. by Daniel J. Taylor, 251–274, Amsterdam – Philadelphia.

Viljamaa, Toivo. 1995. “Paradosis and synetheia. Language study in classical antiquity”, Acta antiqua Academiae Sci-entiarum Hungaricae 36:169–176.

Lara Pagani

Linguistic Variation in Classical Attic

Classical → Attic, used in literary master works of the 5th and 4th c. BCE (philosophy, tragedy, oratory), enjoyed a long-standing prestige over the other Greek dialects and a leading role in the development of the Hellenistic Koine and ultimately of Modern Greek. The expansion of Athens in both the political and cultural sphere in the 5th c. has been described in numerous historical and literary studies. Its language (= the westernmost variety of → Ionic) replaced (East-ern) Ionic in its position as the most prestigious of the Greek dialects as a result of various socio-political developments after the Persian Wars.

‘Variationist’ analysis of a dead language is a difficult task, presenting additional prob-lems not faced by scholars researching the literary and oral corpora of currently spoken languages. While those researching ‘living’ lan-guages can ‘control’ their data by eliciting the desired information from speakers by means of recordings and questionnaires, historical socio-linguists are reduced to a much more passive role. They have to work only with various writ-ten documents in different genres and dialects, and to attempt to extract evidence for spoken language from these. Thus for a ‘dead’ language such as Classical Attic, the results of the analysis of topics such as the nature of → written versus oral language and colloquial and conversational style cannot match the results of contempo-rary sociolinguistics, which deals predominantly with the ‘spoken’ language. The other topics which will be examined here, within these lim-its, include: sources and perspectives of ‘varia-tionist’ analysis, the intersection of synchronic and diachronic variation, ancient awareness of

language varieties (→ Attitudes to Language), convergences and divergences with respect to other dialects, and low registers and the speech of foreigners.

1. Sources and Perspectives of ‘Variationist’ Analysis

The extraordinarily rich documentation in both epigraphic and literary texts of different genres distinguishes Attica from the rest of the Greek-speaking area and provides an invaluable source for the study of linguistic variation in both the diachronic and synchronic perspectives. In dia-chronic terms, the core question is that of the formation process and rise of Attic as a literary standard over the course of the 5th c. BCE. As documented by literary and epigraphic texts, this century was crucial for the process of the standardization of the language, which took place in a relatively short time during the era of Pericles and the Peloponnesian War. The forma-tion of Standard Attic can be described in terms of evolution from ‘Old Attic’ toward ‘Great Attic’ in the sense of an “Attic-based supradialectal variety contaminated with Ionic used in Attica and elsewhere” (Bubenik 1981:75) and the rise of a “standard written language of business and administration among the middle and upper classes” (Horrocks 2010:74). A diachronic distinc-tion between ‘Old Attic’ and ‘Later Attic’ was already made by Hellenistic grammarians (e.g. Herodian), based on the difference of accentua-tion (e.g. erêmos / érēmos ‘desert, void’, cf. Prob-ert 2004), which is in agreement with the change of the phonological system (Teodorsson 1979; → Phonology (Survey)).

Synchronically, any variation can be defined only in relation (or in contrast) to other variants. Synchronic variation is frequently encountered at the crossroads of multiple factors, such as dia-chronic changes, various registers and conver-gence with other dialects. Both inscriptions and literary texts present us with considerable differ-ences in registers (e.g. private vs. public inscrip-tions, formal vs. informal style), socio-cultural level of speaker and/or addressee (e.g. → graffiti, painted vase inscriptions) and contamination with other dialects, as conveyed by individual lit-erary genres. Thus the change in the phonologi-cal system (→ Phonological Change) observable over the course of the 5th c. can be described in terms of the rise of a low register, called “Attic


linguistic variation in classical attic 365

dimotiki” (Teodorsson 1979:68), as the everyday speech used by the common people.

In sociolinguistic terms, standard Attic can be viewed as an expression of the intellectual and political middle class within a heterogeneous metropolitan environment. It is to be expected that the regional diversity and vertical differ-entiation within ‘Great Attic’ produced various phenomena of diglossia; the latter became even more prominent during the Hellenistic era when the sociolinguistic continuum also included Attic-based panhellenic Koine. Teodorsson (2007:466) demonstrated that in the course of the 4th c. BCE we can distinguish two phono-logical subsystems of Attic: the local one, more conservative, and another one, more innovative, spoken outside Attica by an essentially Ionian community (López Eire 2002).

2. Awareness of Language Varieties in Antiquity

Attic comedy (→ Comedy, Diction of) is not only one of the main sources for our study of linguis-tic variation, but also an important witness to the awareness of language varieties among its audience. The cultural benchmark of the lin-guistic awareness in Aristophanes is revealed by the distinction between a refined and cultivated variety (diálektos asteía hupothēlutéra) and a boorish and vulgar one (diálektos aneleútheros hupagroitéra): between these, a middle stage is represented by the ‘average language of the city’ (diálektos mésē póleōs) (Brixhe 1997:401); but on the whole, “references to social varieties of language seem to occur in quite restricted circumstances” (Colvin 1999:287). Comedy pro-vides us with the first occurrences of the verb attikízein (Pl. Com. frg. 168 K.; Eup. 8,3 D). Sig-nificantly, this verb, which in subsequent usage refers to the dialect of Attica as distinct from other Greek dialects (Heracl. Des. Graec. 3.2.8 Pf. = FGH II 263) or, later on, to a linguistic ideology for rhetorical prose, means ‘to speak in a correct manner’. This is shown by Plato (Pl. Com. frg. 168 K.), where this verb is used to contrast the pronunciation olíon with olígon ‘little’ resulting by the weakening of /g/ (see section 7 below). This phenomenon, quoted for comic purposes as indicative of uneducated and inaccurate speech, afterwards became linked with the pronuncia-tion of the middle class (it is recorded in Attic inscriptions of a different sort, cf. Threatte 1981).

Political views also influenced the perception of the identity of the Attic dialect among the speakers’ community. The awareness of the Attic appurtenance to the Ionic world, rooted in the Athenian society, as mentioned by Solon (frg. 4 Diehl) and Thucydides (3.86.3; 4.60.61), is consis-tent with the idea of the autochthonous origin of the inhabitants and the language of Attica (Pl. Men. 238d), attributed to the ‘democratic’ Pericles (Thuc. 2.35). This was in contrast with the view of the oligarchically-oriented Athēnaíōn Politeía (2.8), that emphasizes the mixed nature of the Athenian culture and language as a ‘blend-ing of all Greeks and barbarians’, at variance with other Greeks (hoi mèn Héllēnes idíai mâllon phōnêi kaì diaítēi kaì skhḗmati khrôntai, Athēnaîoi dè kekraménēi ex hapántōn tôn Hellḗnōn kaì barbárōn). This latter view matches linguistic features of the Athēnaíōn Politeía, which, sur-prisingly unlike those of contemporary prose writers, are open to innovations and closer to the subsequent evolutionary features of Koine. Among these we can mention the use of heíneken instead of héneka (another variant in 4th-c. Attic is héneken); dióti replacing simple hóti and cer-tain morpho-syntactic phenomena, such as the construction of hóti with the → infinitive; the absolute nominative; and pleonastic repetition of the particle án (Pfister 1914).

The evaluation of these phenomena varies depending on the attitude of our authors. For instance, as for the phonetic rendition of the phonemes represented by the spellings <H>, <EI>, <I>, /ē/, /ei/ /i/, Plato (Crat. 418c) distin-guishes a more archaic pronunciation of the word hēméra [hɛːméraː] or [himéraː] ‘day’ from a modern one [hɛ:méra:]: hoi mèn arkhaiótatoi ‘himéran’ tḕn hēméran ekáloun, hoi dè ‘heméran’, hoi dè nûn hēméran. On the other hand, Aristo-phanes (Thesm. 1102–1108) regards an indifferent realization by [i] of three distinct phonemes /ē, ēi, ei/ (represented by mḗ, phuláxēi, légeis) as a ‘sub-standard’ marker of a foreign talk (see section 7). Examples of these variants, however, are occasionally found in literary standard, e.g. in alternative spellings of the preposition eis/es (spelled also is in private inscriptions).

Again, at variance with Plato, who considers the female speech to be more conservative than that of males (hai gunaîkes, haíper málista tḕn arkhaían phōnḕn sṓzousin: Crat. 418c), the image of female speech recoverable from Aristophanes “shows traces of a greater readiness on the part


366 linguistic variation in classical attic

of Athenian women to accept new linguistic trends” (Willi 2003:194).

3. At the Crossroads of Synchronic and Diachronic Variations

It has often been observed that in Classical Attic, conservative features combine with innovative features. For instance, archaisms are preserved in morphology (the most striking is the persistence of the → dual, cf. Risch 1954:12), whereas in mor-pho-syntax we observe an alternation in the use of the morphological cases (genitive and dative) and their phrasal counterparts (preposi-tional cases) (cf. Schwyzer 1940, Bortone 2010).On the other hand, certain ‘archaic’ features of ‘Old Attic’ were partly eliminated from the liter-ary language. For instance, in the lexicon the comparatives oleízōn ‘smaller’, pleîn ‘larger’ were replaced by eláttōn, pléon; the verb thingánō ‘touch’ by háptomai; simple prepositions found a competitor in new prepositional phrases, such as metá + genitive alongside (k)sún + dative, perí + genitive in substitution of e(i)s + accusa-tive. For this issue in Thucydides see López Eire (1997b).

As a reaction to analogical simplifications of other dialects, certain irregularities are pre-served in verbal paradigms; for instance, in the plural forms of oîda ‘I know’ (e.g. ísmen instead of analogical oídamen) and in the → aorist of títhēmi ‘put, place’ (éthemen instead of ana-logical ethḗkamen) (→ Analogy). Resistance to analogical innovations in verbal and nominal paradigms is also observable in 4th- and 3rd-c. Attic; suffice it to mention the rarity of the remodeling of the 1st-ps. sg. imperfect/aorist in -a (e.g. eîpa instead of eîpon ‘I said’) and the rarity of the ending -an in the acc. sg. of conso-nantal stems in inscriptions (Threatte 1996:88, 548). Idiolects and individual stylistic choices occasionally give rise to variants of a differ-ent kind: e.g. parêkan ‘they permitted’ occurs in Thucydides (imitating Ionic?) in the place of paríesan (paralleling Euripides’ anêkan); and eîpa is not rare in Menander, probably reflecting the colloquial style.

Innovative and conservative forms are dif-ferently distributed, even within the same liter-ary genre. For instance, the analogical forms of the 3rd-ps. pl. aorist éthesan ‘they placed’, édo-san ‘they gave’ alternate at different ratios with the earlier forms éthēkan, édōkan in Aeschylus,

Sophocles, and Euripides. Euripides’ usage is in this respect convergent with Aristophanes’ (Hoffmann & Debrunner 1969 I:109).

The remodeling of athematic verbs after thematic paradigms follows different patterns: the verb mísgō ‘mix’ (inflected as a thematic verb) occurs in Thucydides and Plato (perhaps influenced by the epic Ionic dialect), whereas m(e)ígnumi appears in Aristophanes (López Eire 1997b:84). On the other hand, in curse inscriptions the contract form katadô ‘bind’ is the most frequent one, alongside the less fre-quent uncontracted katadéō (also with different spelling katadḗō), but more rarely katadídēmi and katadēnúō (a compromise form between -ō and -nu-mi patterns) are also found (Threatte 1996:518–519).

As is generally accepted, synchronic variation can yield diachronic changes. For instance, the preposition sún originated as a ‘low’ variant of xún (Lazzeroni 1984:18); the latter, however, is still preferred by Thucydides (at variance with Plato). Compared with other dialects, the plural → dative suffix -ois of o-stems was initially used in alternation with -oisi in particular phono-syntactic contexts in colloquial style (López Eire 1997b:100); in ā-stems the dative suffix -ais, resulting from analogical remodeling after -oisi : -ois, replaced the Ionic -ēis(i). The paths of this evolution, which affected official → epigraphy only after 420 BCE, are observable in Aeschy-lus’ plays, where both -aisi and -ais are found, unlike the contemporary inscriptions showing -asi / -ēis(i). In sum, the rise of the dative plural endings -ais and -ois, which were adopted as the literary standard, is the outcome of an analogical process that prevailed over the distribution of the respective variants in different registers.

4. Convergence and Divergence with Respect to Other Dialects

As is the case with other literary languages, the rise of the Attic dialect to a literary lan-guage is a result of a complex interaction of convergence and divergence with respect to other dialects. On the literary side, the influence of literary dialects was connected with various literary genres. On the demographic side, the process of convergence with other dialects was facilitated by Athenian linguistic policy, particu-larly among members of the Delian-Attic league starting from the middle 5th c. (Crespo 2006).



During the 6th and 5th c., we witness an increas-ing flow to Athens of foreigners of different social standing and cultural backgrounds (Risch 1964; Cassio 1981; Brixhe 1997). As mentioned above, in the 5th c. the Attic dialect (= the westernmost variety of Ionic) replaced East-ern (Asian) Ionic as the most prestigious of the Greek dialects (→ Language Policies; → Attitudes to Language).

In orthography, Ionic influence on the dialect of Attica is shown by the occasional use of Ionic spellings (before Euclides’ reform in 403–402) with <H> and <Ω> for /ε:/ and /ɔ:/ accompanying Ionicisms in private inscriptions since the early 5th c. (Immerwahr 1990:176; López Eire 1997b:85; → Adoption of the Ionic Alphabet in Attica). The Ionic features in Classical Attic have a different role and value depending on genre and context. For instance, verses with Ionicisms create a high register in tragedies, in parallel to poetic funer-ary inscriptions (López Eire 1997b:102). Accord-ing to Colvin (1999:270) Ionicisms “have a variety of connotations in Attic comedy, ranging from the technical and sophisticated to the (more tra-ditional) decadent and effeminate”. Unlike the Ionicisms found in comedy, roughly contempo-rary to Koine, those attested in Attic inscriptions earlier than 403 BCE “are not the ones that per-sisted in Koine, that indicates that the non-Attic features had not yet been fixed for administra-tive use” (Crespo 2006:99).

Ionicisms distinguish not only literary genres from each other, but also individual choices of each author within the same genre, depending on the level of one’s education, ideology or polit-ical aims. Thus among prose writers Thucydides differs from Plato in his use of xún instead of sún, and of typical non-Attic ‘shibboleths’ such as -rs- and -ss- instead of -rr- and -tt-. In this respect he agrees with tragic playwrights and partly with comic plays.

On the other hand, standard Attic was deeply influenced by Ionic prose, as reflected in the increasing quantity of derivatives in -sis, mod-eled after hálōsis ‘capture, conquest’, epíklēsis ‘surname, call’ and so on, that enriched the Attic intellectual and technical lexicon (Cassio 1981:90). Dialects also contributed to the use of technical terminology and the formation of technical vocabularies in general. For instance, the Ionicisms thalassokratéō ‘to be master of the sea’ and thalassokrátores ‘masters of the sea’, coined by Herodotus, are used in a techni-

cal sense by Thucydides, Xenophon, and in the Athēnaíōn Politeía. For the same reason, words pertaining to other dialects, among them those with long ā (called alpha impurum), may signal either the foreign provenance of the speaker or their appurtenance to various registers, such as colloquial or technical language. Thus the alpha impurum is usually preserved in proper names, such as in personal and ethnic names (e.g. Kâres, Pardṓkas), but also in technical terms referring to particular foreign institutions or concepts, such as the Spartan lokhagós ‘leader of an armed band’ and neodamṓdēs ‘newly enfranchized’ in both Thucydides and Xenophon (Hoffmann & Debrunner 1969 I:140). Technical language (used in e.g. philosophy, medicine, etc.) also dis-plays morphophonemic phenomena stemming from different dialects: derivatives formed by the suffix -îtis (exempted from the Ionic-Attic change -ti- > -si-), adjectives with the suffix -ṓdēs instead of -eidḗs (e.g. sarkṓdēs ‘fleshy’), and ana-logically extended suffixes, e.g. -ēma (Schironi 2010). New → abstract nouns derived with the suffixes -sis, -ma, -smos and adjectives in -ikós, originating in Ionic philosophical and historical prose, enlarged considerably the lexicon of the learned and upper classes in different domains, as shown by Hyperides’ and Demosthenes’ rhetorical prose and Menander’s plays (López Eire 2002).

Unlike tragedy, where dialectal Ionic and Doric features (mostly belonging to epic and lyric poetry) distinguish dialogues and choral parts, comedy mixes variants of both diatopic and dialectal origin for various purposes, par-ticularly for featuring characters or for parodies of other genres (Colvin 1999:266, Willi 2003:233). For instance, Ionic conveys an image of effemi-nate habits or intellectualism (Cassio 1981:91), whereas → Doric echoes medical language (Willi 2003:86). Compromise forms between Ionic or Doric and Attic differentiate idiolects as well as different registers. For instance, the Attic form for the numeral ‘four’ is téttara (used by Aristo-phanes), but téssara (partially reproducing the Ionic form téssera) was adopted by Thucydides and by Koine. In the oath formula tàn Pher-réphattan, uttered by a procuress in a comic fragment (Epicr. Frg. 9 K.), the Doric article tán combines with the Attic form of the goddess’s name Pherréphatta.

Understandably, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the potential influence of other



dialects from an independent or internal Attic development. For instance, the → mediopassive imperative suffixes -ésthōn and -ósthōn, common to Ionic and the literary language of different genres, analogically remodeled after their active counterpart -óntōn, were used in Doric and in administrative inscriptions until 424 BCE (Lazze-roni 1984:23). The fact that both suffixes (-ésthōn and -ósthōn) occur in public epigraphy during the Peloponnesian War might point to different attitudes of state administration in this crucial period of Athenian history. In addition, ana-logical remodelings of the imperative are quite common in different contexts. For instance, the 2nd-ps. sg. of the aorist imperative -thi was replaced by the present suffix -e; píthi ‘drink!’ was used in comedy while píe(i) appears in the toasting formula in vase inscriptions khaîre kaì píei ‘cheers and drink!’ (Threatte 1996:455–458; Wachter 2004). On the other hand, the suffixes of the 3 pl. imperative -ntōsan, -ítōsan (remod-eled after the sigmatic aorist) which are found alongside with -óntōn, are variously distributed: imperatives éstōsan ‘let them be’ and ítōsan ‘let them go’ occur in Euripides in agreement with Thucydides, while Aeschylus and Sophocles dis-play the earlier form estóntōn. Significantly, in this case literary documentation appears prior to epigraphic evidence (Schwyzer 1968 I:802; Thre-atte 1996:464).

With respect to lexicon and syntax, phrasal compounds with poiéō ‘do, make’, such as epi-méleian poioûmai ‘I take care of ’ replacing epimeloûmai (López Eire 1997b:96; Brixhe 1997), found already in Ionic prose (mainly Herodo-tus), increasingly entered the everyday language of common people and are continued by Hel-lenistic and Byzantine Greek.

5. Written / Oral

Literacy is a fundamental aspect of the formation of standard Attic and the source of our informa-tion about sociolinguistic variation. The crucial question in the evaluation of the considerable Attic documentation is to what extent various kind of texts (especially inscriptions) are reliable as evidence for the spoken language of both lit-erate and poorly educated people (Immerwahr 2007).

Democracy, ‘imperialism’, and rhetorical learning during the period of Athenian power

and prestige favored the rise of a unified and to some extent morphophonemically simplified language, suitable for both internal and external (‘international’) communication. The stoiche-don style of epigraphy, public archives, literary prose, and finally the Ionic alphabet, officially introduced by the so-called ‘Eucleidean reform’ in 403–402 BCE, made the written language accessible to broad masses of population. The adoption of the Ionic alphabet gave the chance of representing in written texts variations that had developed in the Attic phonological system since the late 6th c. BCE, as shown by ortho-graphic alternations between /ei/, /e/ ~ /i/ and /ē/ ~ /i/, signaled by the sporadic use of the Ionian alphabet (Immerwahr 1990). The Ionic alphabet could distinguish between two types of e’s and two types of o’s (half-close vs. half-open) of 5th-c. Attic by means of <EI> vs. <H>, and <OY> vs. <Ω>, while pre-Euclidean spellings used <EI> for the diphthong /ei/ and <E> for /e/ and for /ɛː/; and similarly <OY> for the ancient diphthong /ou/ and <O> for /o/ and for /ɔː/. Some features of the oral style were adopted by the literary standard of written texts, such as the dative plural ending -ois, mentioned above, aris-ing from a ‘shorter’ variant before initial vowel of the following word (López Eire 1997b:94).

The increasing spread of epigraphic formulas (not only for administrative purposes, but also for informal contexts, such as curse inscriptions) together with the growth of the literary stan-dard prose contributed to the fixation of stan-dard models and influenced everyday language (López Eire 1997b; Löschhorn 2007). The for-mulas for oaths and international treaties may show that the “Athenians used the Attic dialect as a standard form of written communication in their relations with the city-states” (Crespo 2004:116).

The ‘scribe’ (grammateús), figuring in pub-lic documents, was personally responsible not only for the oral/written correspondence, but also for the spelling correctness, as confirmed by the fact that “several orthographic phenom-ena are normally or even exclusively found only in private texts” (Threatte 1981:5). Furthermore, the standardization of written Attic gave way to the linguistic conservatism of the Attic inscrip-tions of different type after the 5th c. BCE, unlike other dialectal epigraphy of the Greek speaking area.



6. Colloquial and Conversational Style

Evidence for elements of conversational and colloquial style is mainly found in dialogues in drama and prose. A particular effect of the spoken language is the ‘allegroform’, manifested by the frequent occurrence of unusual → crasis (liaison) and of initial or final vowel elimination (e.g. in Aristophanes egṓd’ = egṑ oîda ‘I know’; dḕ ’kekhḗnē = dḕ ekekhḗnē ‘and it had a gape’; and ei ’legon = ei élegon ‘if I would say’). In prose, the crasis is more restricted (it mostly occurs in phrases with kaí, e.g. kalós kagathós ‘beautiful and good’, cf. Threatte 1981), and vowel elision is less common. A further clue for conversa-tional register is the use of shorter word forms (e.g. apélou’ instead of apéloue ‘he was washing off ’; ekorubántiz’ instead of ekorubántize ‘he was purifying by Corybantic rites’ in Aristophanes (Vesp. 118–119)). As mentioned above, the shorter form of the dat. pl. -ois also originated in the spoken language and was adopted by the literary standard in any context.

Comedy supplies us with evidence of features for informal registers of different types, which are common to Koine and to the subsequent stages of Greek. Among the syntactic features the following deserve to be mentioned (already in Aristophanes): the use of parataxis instead of hypotaxis (e.g. katagelâs mou, dêlos eî: ‘it is apparent, you mock me’, Aristoph. Av. 1407); rep-etition of the particle hṓs without a syntactic construction (López Eire 1997a:201); the spread of kaí at the expense of other particles (espe-cially dé, in adversative meaning), as well as in apodosis or for introducing the main clause after a subordinate one; and the use of hína instead of hópōs, hōs for introducing a final clause or after a verb denoting the aim or the effort (cf. López Eire 1986:253).

7. Low Registers and Foreigners’ Talk

Low registers result from various factors, such as the socio-cultural position of the speakers, the speech context, the attitude of the speaker towards the addressee, and influence from the speech of foreigners (→ Ancient Bidialectalism and Bilingualism). The language of inscriptions on the famous painted vases produced in Attica and exported throughout the Mediterranean is

an important source for our study of low regis-ters. Their style differs not only from the style of official public epigraphy but also from that of the various private inscriptions (e.g. funerary and curse texts).

The co-occurrence of Ionicisms, features of other dialects (mostly the preservation of ā) and phenomena reflecting colloquial usage (such as the changes -dn- > -gn-, -dm- > -sm-), together with alternative spellings (Wachter 2007, Immerwahr 2007), point to a language not yet standardized, attributable, on the one hand, to diverse idiolects of individual potters or paint-ers (Immerwahr 2007) and, on the other hand, to a professional language of the dialectally diverse potters’ circle (Schulze 1896).

Linguistic variants documented by Attic vase inscriptions result from several different factors, most notably:

(1) differing levels of personal literacy, proved by different graphic accuracy of individual painters, e.g. by the omission of vowels and/or consonants

(2) the reflections of informal and colloquial usage, many of which are indicative of con-temporary phonetic processes, such as the merging of the phonemes /e:/, /ε:/, /y:/

(3) differing dialectal backgrounds among vari-ous potters and painters, which is shown by the appearance of different dialectal features. Among these features the major-ity of Ionicisms is to be connected with the more prestigious role assigned to this dialect, at least until the middle of the 5th century BCE.

Several morphological and phonological features displayed in vase inscriptions were eliminated in Attic literature, since they were considered to relate to low registers. Here are the salient ones:

(1) iotacism (e.g. Oliseús for Olusseús and, as hypercorrection, paús instead of paîs ‘child’), whose early evidence has been recognized as the starting point of the change of the Attic vocalic system (Teodorsson 1974; 1979)

(2) weakening of /g/ (e.g. the personal name Laûkos instead of Glaûkos)

(3) vowel syncope (e.g. Alxandros for Aléxan-dros; epoisn for epoíēsen ‘he made’) or vowel → anaptyxis (e.g. Heremês for Hermês);



(4) elimination of a nasal before consonants (e.g. núphai for númphai ‘nymphs’; Atalátē for Atalántē (personal name), and hypercor-rection with assimilated consonants in the personal name Tlēnpónemos for Tlepólemos);

(5) omission of the morphological markers -s and -n (e.g. Oluteú for Olutteús; Timagóra for Timagóras);

(6) merging of the suffixes -eús, -ús and -ēs (e.g. Akhilleús ~ Akhillḗs; Theseús ~ Thesús) as a consequence of the evolution of /eu/ > /ev/ or /ē/;

(7) convergence of /u/ and /ē/ towards /i/; (8) various outcomes of the monophthongiza-

tion of /ei/ and /ai/; and (9) different treatment of aspirates depending

on the phonetic context (intervocalic, after /s/ or in a → Grassmann’s Law environment).

Some mythological names appearing in Attic literature were restored after the epic tradition; e.g. Perseús instead of Perreús and Kassándra instead of Kattándra (at variance with the Attic treatment of the consonant clusters /rs/ > /rr/ and /ss/ > /tt/, respectively). Similarly, Odysseus’ name, common in tragic plays dealing with epic matters in its classical form, does not occur in inscriptions before the late 5th c., where the variants Olutteús and Olusseús are found (Thre-atte 1980:484; Cassio 1981:84). The anthroponyms Kádmos and Ádmētos were restored for Kásmos and Ásmētos (attested in vase inscriptions), fol-lowing the evolution -dm- > -sm- undergone by literary standard (cf. osmḗ < odmḗ ‘odor’; ísmen < ídmen ‘we know’) at variance with Agamémnōn instead of Agamésmōn (< *aga-medmōn) appear-ing on the vases.

Many phenomena documented in non-offi-cial inscriptions also appear in the speech of foreigners in Aristophanes’ plays. For instance, the speech of Scythian archers (Aristoph. Thesm. 1001ff.) is characterized by the lack of aspirated sounds (oukì pilḗsi instead of oukhì philḗseis ‘you shall not love’), the omission of final -s and -n (tḕ miará for tḕn miarán ‘the polluted-fem. acc.’; panoûrgo for panoûrgos ‘cunning, crafty’); the confusion in grammatical gender (Attikós mélis instead of Attikón méli ‘Attic honey’); and other grammatical errors, such as the simpli-fication of irregular declension (e.g. toû gála instead of toû gálaktos ‘of the milk’ and gunḗn instead of gunaîka ‘woman-fem. acc.’, attested in other comic playwrights (Plat. Com. frg. 78;

238 K.)). All these point to a convergence of a sub-standard Attic and the language spoken by foreigners (Cassio 1981:84, Brixhe 1997:403, Col-vin 1999:291).

Foreigners (both Greeks and non-Greeks) from various regions and of a heterogeneous socio-cultural standing formed a considerable part of Athenian society, as a result of the economic importance of Attica which attracted a flow of immigrants even before the Persian wars. Suffice it to mention that among immigrants there were some of the most outstanding personalities of Attic rhetorical prose: Gorgias from Leontini and Protagoras from Abdera. However, the extent to which these foreign immigrants contributed to the standardization of literary Attic remains a rather complicated and much-debated mat-ter (see Risch 1957; Cassio 1981; Lazzeroni 1984; Brixhe 1997).

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Paolo Poccetti

Literary Prose

The phrase literary prose refers to Ancient Greek texts that, written in prose, have a literary pur-pose. The ancient Greeks’ concern for the for-mal, stylistic or artistic aspects of their prose leads them to including in this definition some genres that, in modern languages, would be out of the literary sphere, such as history, philosophy or scientific prose. This entry pays attention to the literary use of the Ancient Greek language (dialectal and grammatical elements as well as, collaterally, style and vocabulary) in Classical

literary prose, from its origin in the Ionic area of Asia Minor during the second half of the 6th c. BCE, to its development and peak in Athens, in the 5th and 4th c. BCE. For the subsequent development, see → Hellenistic Literary Prose and → Late Antiquity Prose.

The earliest Greek literature was composed in verse: metrical rhythms and other stylistic devices related to this poetry correspond to a predominantly oral culture that, besides, inter-prets the world from its own myths and beliefs. The origin of prose reflects an innovative change of mentality: for the Greeks, the use of ordinary language becomes a suitable tool to express the scientific, philosophical, ethnographic or histo-riographical thought, in a rational and abstract way which differs from the mythical and reli-gious explanations. Ancient Greeks, like all other peoples, presumably narrated stories in prose, such as fables and tales that were orally spread (there are, for instance, remnants of this in the collection of fables that Demetrius of Phalerum (ca. 350–280 BCE) composed in the 3rd c. BCE). In addition, from the 7th c. BCE onwards, a number of laws, public records, lists of differ-ent subjects, private letters, graffiti, etc., were also written in prose. Among these kinds of documents with a mainly practical functional-ity (in some cases, with remarkable devices of style and vocabulary), we still have the testi-mony of inscriptions. It is commonly agreed that there was a → Doric scientific prose, which was employed by the Pythagorean School in the Italian Magna Graecia, but none of these works has been preserved for us (the earliest extant Doric prose writings belong to the mathemati-cian Archimedes of Syracuse, ca. 287–212 BCE). Therefore, to us, Ancient Greek literary prose begins on the eastern coast of the Aegean sea, primarily in the city of Miletus, during the 6th c. BCE: for the first time ever, not only philoso-phers and thinkers like Pherecydes of Syros (6th c. BCE), Thales (ca. 630–545 BCE), Anaximander (ca. 610–546 BCE) or Anaximenes of Miletus (ca. 585–524 BCE), and Heraclitus of Ephesus (ca. 535–484 BCE), but also geographers and logogra-phers, such as Hecataeus of Miletus (ca. 550–476 BCE) use the → Ionic dialect in order to write their works. This very first prose has come down to us in a fragmentary form, through indirect testimonies that may have altered the original language. According to Meillet (1975:229), only


Linguistic variation in Classical Attic

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