[B-Greek] dialects

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Fri Jun 17 06:39:14 EDT 2005


On Jun 16, 2005, at 11:32 PM, Mitch Larramore wrote:

> When grammars talk about their being many "dialects"
> of ancient Greek, such as Attic, Doric, and Ionic,
> what exactly does that mean?
>
> Here's a definition of "dialect" on dictionary.com:
>
> A variety of language that with other varieties
> constitutes a single language of which no single
> variety is standard: the dialects of Ancient Greek.
>
> I've not read much on this, so my questions may be
> obnoxiously simple,

Surely you jest: "simplle" questions aren't obnoxious, and I don't  
really think this is so simple a question. It's considerably more  
complex than it appears on the surface. By way of introduction, I'd  
note that although dialects continued on through the period of Koine  
and beyond, the language spoken and written in government and  
commerce tended to become much more consistent after the Alexandrian  
conquests: simplified Attic grammar with some Ionic spelling  
peculiarities (since the Macedonian conquerors used Ionic -- this  
involves, for example, QALASSA (Ionic) instead of QALATTA (Attic) for  
"sea" and some other items.

> but are the different "dialects"
> more so different spellings/pronunciations of
> different words, or were the differences more
> substantial? One example was the changing of -TT to
> -SS in the word for "sea."

That's not a matter of changing but a matter of Ionic-speakers  
pronouncing the same word as a sibilant rather than as a double hard-T.

> I usally think of "dialect"
> as being something quite different than "accents."
> (And by "accents" I mean something close  to how we in
> southern USA say the word "car" different than a
> Bostonian, who might say "khaa." There appears to be
> two different words for "automobile" in this example,
> although they seem related, but in reality of course
> they are just different pronunciations of the same
> word.) One other example I read was the use of
> different suffixes for verb endings. But the
> difference really seemed to be spelling rather than a
> whole different conjugation.
>
> Finally, would someone from Attic be quite fluent in
> Doric and vice versa?

As you have read, it is BOTH a matter of pronunciation AND a matter  
of usage, by which I refer to both vocabulary and inflection. Ionic  
dialects and subdialects tended, for instance, to contract contiguous  
-EO- into EU or not to contract them at all, so that you might see in  
Ionic POIEUNTAS or POIEONTAS as acc. pl. m. ptcs of POIEW; Ionic used  
-AISI and -OISI for dative plurals of first- and second-declension  
nouns respectively, and where Attic uses -OU for the genitive sg. of  
first-declension masculine nouns, Ionic uses -EW. Spartans said SIOS  
while Athenians said QEOS. Some differences persisted over the ages;  
I've read somewhere that eastern Aegean Ionians used OULOS for hOLOS  
in antiquity and that Greek-speakers on the eastern Aegean coast  
before being driven out by the Turks back in the 1930's still used  
OULOS when other Greeks used OLOS. And yes, there are significant  
inflectional differences in verbs too: Lesbian Aeolic (Sappho and  
Alcaeus) had -MI verb forms of Attic contract verbs: POIHMI, TIMAMI  
for POIEW, TIMAW.

Could people from different Greek-speaking dialect areas understand  
each other? I think that they could, more or less, at least to the  
extent that Londoners can understand Scots and Yorkshire dialects.  
It's significant that the Homeric epics were composed and preserved  
in a linguistic melange that doesn't represent the way Greek was ever  
spoken in any one place -- it is a mixed artificial dialect using  
formulaic phrases in various dialects from all over the Greek- 
speaking world: you may find an Ionic -OIO (gen. sg.) and an Attic - 
OU in adjacent lines, or a Doric POTI not too far from an Attic PROS/
Thucydides in his history of the Peloponnesian War tends to give both  
Spartan Doric and Attic versions of the official treaties that  
occasionally interrupted the hostilities over the course of that 27- 
year conflict. Aristophanes in his Lysistrata has the Spartan women  
speaking Doric (or 'sounding' like Doric-speakers). One fascinating  
Hellenistic literary piece is Idyll 15 of Theocritus, which is a mime  
of the conversation of women from Syracuse in Sicily who have settled  
into Alexandria as they meet at the home of one woman and go downtown  
to a religious festival to see the sights.

This is really a complex subject. Geoffrey Horrocks, _Greek: A  
History of the Language and its Speakers_ is good. I have a  
compendium of a dozen and a half annotated texts from the Archaic  
era, Papyri, Byzantine, and a couple later pieces that illustrates  
some of what's involved in these dialectal differences. The classic  
work is from three-quarters of a century ago, C. D. Buck's _The Greek  
Dialects_.


Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at ioa.com or cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/




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