A ‘norm’ in the Ancient Greek dialectal lexicon? A comparative study of Gregory of Corinth’s Περὶ Αἰολίδος and the anonymous Γλῶσσαι κατὰ πόλεις (Urb. Gr. 157)

A most notable feature of Standard Modern Greek (SMG) lexicon is the abundance of pairs of lexemes of similar meaning which belong to different registers. Thus, while one lexeme pertains to the colloquial language and is widely used both in oral and written speech, a semantically akin or even synonymous word of Ancient (i.e., Classical) Greek (AG) origin is also attested in specific contexts. The latter ones are usually described as part of the “archaic” or “learned” component of the Modern Greek (MG) lexicon. In the light of three case studies, our paper aims at investigating this variation by conducting research through diachronic corpora. We intend to disperse certain misconceptions concerning lexical change (which is erroneously interpreted as a straightforward replacement of an “older” word with a new one) and to introduce the concepts of adstratal and superstratal lexicon along with the theory of prototypicality and exaptation in the relevant research. Along with dealing with the diachrony of the Greek lexicon, our account sketches a first theoretical framework for investigating the lexicon of languages with a long-recorded history and diglossic contradictions. Accordingly, it emphasizes the vital role of corpora research in diachronic semantics and onomasiology

We present a method to explore semantic change as a function of variation in distributional semantic spaces. In this paper we apply this approach to automatically identify the areas of semantic change in the lexicon of Ancient Greek between the pre-Christian and Christian era. Distributional Semantic Models are used to identify meaningful clusters and patterns of semantic shift within a set of target words, defined through a purely data-driven approach. The results emphasize the role played by the diffusion of Christianity and by technical languages in determining semantic change in Ancient Greek and show the potentialities of distributional models in diachronic semantics.

We present a method to explore semantic change as a function of variation in distributional semantic spaces. In this paper, we apply this approach to automatically identify the areas of semantic change in the lexicon of Ancient Greek between the pre-Christian and Christian era. Distributional Semantic Models are used to identify meaningful clusters and patterns of semantic shift within a set of target words, defined through a purely data-driven approach. The results emphasize the role played by the diffusion of Christianity and by technical languages in determining semantic change in Ancient Greek and show the potentialities of distributional models in diachronic semantics.

With an attested history of more than 3,000 years, Greek is one of the languages central for the reconstruction of the common proto-language of the Indo-European language family that also comprises the Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Indo-Aryan, Tocharian and Anatolian (including e.g., Hittite and Luwian), Armenian, and Albanian subphyla. The earliest documentation of Greek is clay tablets written in a syllabic script, Linear B, from the second half of the second millennium bce, the earliest specimens of which date back to about 1450 bce. After the collapse of the Mycenaean palatial culture in the twelfth century, written documents reappear in different scripts from the eleventh century onward, in a syllabic script on Cyprus and in what became the common Greek alphabet adapted from the Phoenician script probably in the ninth century. Greek phonology is comparatively conservative, which makes it an important comparandum for the reconstruction of the phonological system of the proto-language (Proto-Indo-European, or PIE), including the triple representation of the PIE “laryngeals” *h1/2/3 visible in this language, while other branches show a single reflex, such as <ḫ> in Anatolian or a vowel such as /i/ in Sanskrit, /a/ in Latin, etc., or no reflex at all. While Greek nominal morphology is considerably reduced in complexity in comparison to that of other languages such as Sanskrit and Old Church Slavonic, its verbal morphology is roughly as rich in categories as that of the other languages of “Core Indo-European,”, i.e., the subphyla mentioned above, excluding Anatolian with a much simpler system. The rich and early documentation of Greek makes it an important contributor for historical linguistics both for reconstruction and for the study of language change in general. The former includes questions of historical syntax such as basic word order, the positioning of clitics, etc., and the field of PIE “realia” as visible in the Greek lexicon and the corresponding etyma in other languages, ranging from agricultural terminology such as ζυγόν ‘yoke’ = Skt. yugam, Lat. iugum, etc., PIE *i̯ugom, and βοῦς ‘cow’ = Skt. gauḥ, Lat. bōs, etc., PIE *gu̯ōu̯s, to words for divinities such as the personified daylight sky Zεύς = Skt. Dyauḥ, invoked as ‘father Sky’ in Greek Ζεῦ πάτερ = Lat. Iū-piter, Skt. nom. Dyauḥ pitā). The following annotated bibliography tries to capture major reference works and studies on the prehistory, internal history, and synchronic analysis of the Greek language, with a focus on Ancient Greek.

Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship aims at providing a reference work in the field of ancient Greek and Byzantine scholarship and grammar, thus encompassing the broad and multifaceted philological and linguistic research activity during the entire Greek Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The first part of the volume offers a thorough historical overview of ancient scholarship, which covers the period from its very beginnings to the Byzantine era. The second part focuses on the disciplinary profile of ancient scholarship by investigating its main scientific topics. The third and final part presents the particular work of ancient scholars in various philological and linguistic matters, and also examines the place of scholarship and grammar from an interdisciplinary point of view, especially from their interrelation with rhetoric, philosophy, medicine and nature sciences.

Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship aims at providing a reference work in the field of ancient Greek and Byzantine scholarship and grammar, thus encompassing the broad and multifaceted philological and linguistic research activity during the entire Greek Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship aims at providing a reference work in the field of ancient Greek and Byzantine scholarship and grammar, thus encompassing the broad and multifaceted philological and linguistic research activity during the entire Greek Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

The multifaceted 'agōn' – a ‘contest of words’ – is a force formulating classical literary tradition. This book reflects on facets of the 'agōn' and its representations in classical literature across a variety of genres and ideological contexts, from Homer to lyric poetry, drama, law, rhetoric and historiography, and the pivotal role of competition in ancient Greek thought. It sketches out key lines of inquiry pertaining to the study of the 'agōn' as a literary, structural and dialectic form, as a means of authority and power, and as a competitive element in poetic diction and performance. Stimulating fresh discussions under a broad spectrum of theoretical and methodological approaches, this collection of essays explores the wide range of agonal dynamics, and their generic and cultural value.

Ancient Greek scholarship is currently in the centre of a multi-faceted and steadily growing research activity. The volume aims at investigating archetypes, concepts and contexts of the ancient philological discipline from a historical, methodological and ideological perspective. It includes 26 contributions by leading scholars divided into four sections: The ancient scholars at work, The ancient grammarians on Greek language and linguistic correctness, Ancient grammar in historical context  and Ancient grammar in interdisciplinary context. The period examined coincides with the establishment of scholarship as an autonomous discipline from the 3rd century BC to its peak in the first centuries AD. Archetypes and paradigms of philological activity during the classical era help investigate the origins of ancient scholarship, and the interdisciplinary discourse between scholarship, philosophy of language and rhetoric is illustrated. Thus, the thematic spectrum of the volume stretches from the 4th century BC to the Byzantine era. Apart from the Greek antiquity, central aspects of the Latin grammatical tradition are also being examined.

Greek lexicography is in a state of constant evolution thanks to progress in philological studies and, in a special way, to the contribution offered by papyri, which frequently provides us with new words or new meanings of already known words. In this regard, the online, freely consultable database WiP – Words in Progress. Supplementary Lexicon of Ancient Greek aims to collect new or rare words and detail corrections and additions in order to record recent progress in the updating and expansion of Ancient and Byzantine Greek. This contribution aims to describe how the database works, and what advantages it offers compared to traditional dictionaries, with a particular focus on the contribution that Greek documentary papyri offer to Greek lexicography.

Modality can be expressed through a variety of different linguistic means within and across languages, of which one manifestation is through noncanonical case marking of the subject. In Ancient Greek several predicates show a systematic alternation between constructions with nominative and oblique subjects, which coincides with a difference in meaning, yielding a modal meaning in the latter case. We show how this modal meaning cannot be derived from the meaning of the individual parts of the construction, neither from the lexical material nor from the relevant grammatical elements. Instead, the data call for a constructional analysis of a modal subconstruction of the oblique subject construction, for which the modality must be attributed to the construction itself. We argue that this can be viewed through the lens of subjectification in the sense of Traugott (2003), here demonstrating that the semantic relation holding between the subject referent and the oblique case marking selected by the verb has been extended to the empathic relation holding between the speaker and his/her attitude towards the proposition uttered (Barðdal 2004). This, we believe, is how the concept of modality came to be associated with oblique case marking of subjects.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate two things: first, the methodology employed for the study of Middle English lexical dialectal material; and second, the possibility of carrying out some practical applications related to the geographical distributions of lexical items. For the methodology, we focus on the importance of undertaking a cumulative analysis, based on the collection of as much data as possible and from as many sources as we may find for any item. It is essential for the analysis of the data to be aware of the textual histories of the manuscript sources as well. As a practical application of the results obtained from our analysis, we propose to explore the possibility of redefining the localisation of a manuscript by using the lexical material. Localisation according to lexical material might not always agree with localisation according to orthographic criteria, but even if the lexical choices can be conditioned by different factors, the global study of the lexical information together with the phono-graphological features might help to localise some texts more precisely.

This article is an attempt to trace the development of modern dialectics. George W.F. Hegel brought the method of dialectics to fruition through an analysis of the history of philosophy beginning with the ancient Greeks and ‘Oriental’ thought, before traversing the various stages which would eventually culminate in the philosophy of Hegel himself. The author of this article concentrates on the modern epoch in particular, whereby the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Hume are opposed by Kant. Subsequently Kant is fiercely critiqued, by Fichte and Schelling among others, and the Hegelian philosophy emerges, to some extent, as the critique of this critique. Dialectics is the method of Marxism but it is the contention of the author that dialectical materialism (Marxism) cannot be appreciated without reference to Hegel, who was the first thinker to consciously apprehend the movement and interconnection of both thought and being – as totality. Marx made reference to Hegel as ‘that mighty thinker’ in the preface to his Magnus opus while Lenin was later to comment that it is impossible to understand Das Capital without ‘having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's logic’. There is certainly a great deal of difference between Hegel and Marx but dialectics is the method, the thread, which runs through both.

Reviewed by: Collectors, Scholars, and Forgers in the Ancient World: Object Lessons by Carolyn Higbie Alexandra Bounia Carolyn Higbie. Collectors, Scholars, and Forgers in the Ancient World: Object Lessons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. xx + 276 pp. 31 black-and-white figs., 8 color plates. Cloth, $105. Tales about passionate collectors going to extremes to acquire the objects of their desire, or of knowledgeable connoisseurs who allied themselves with collectors or forgers, or worse, failed to recognize an authentic work of art when they encountered it, as well as of artists who directed their skills to help or deceive collectors and connoisseurs have fascinated academic and literary authors since antiquity. Many intricate and intriguing stories with villains and innocent admirers of beauty, stories of vanity, excitement, and/or deceit have informed the adaptations and tales that authors, script writers and film makers have used with varying degrees of success. Literary forgery has similarly attracted popular and academic attention, especially in the case of the books of the Bible and other religious texts (see, for instance, B. D. Ehrman, Forgery and Counter Forgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013]). Medieval and biblical studies have focused their attention on literary deceit and evidence from various sources has been used to pursue specific academic queries or fascinating hypotheses. In the study of the classical world, forgery, copying, collecting and scholarship have not been brought together in a systematic manner. This has been partly the result of the surviving range of evidence and partly of the approaches chosen for the study of the material available to researchers. Copying and forgery have been studied mainly in light of Kopienkritik, and within the fields of archaeology and history of art (for a critique of Kopienkritik, see "Introduction" to E. K. Gazda, ed., The Ancient Art of Emulation [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002]; cf. P. Stewart, "Roman Copies?," CR 55.1 [2005]: 336–8); scholarship has been usually discussed in terms of ancient philology or even antiquarianism (see, for instance F. Montanari and L. Pagani, eds., From Scholars to Scholia. Chapters in the History of Ancient Greek Scholarship [Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011]); whereas collecting in the ancient world has only recently started to attract scholarly attention (for a comprehensive bibliography and a selected set of articles, see M. W. Gahtan and D. Pegazzano, eds., Museum Archetypes and Collecting in the Ancient World [Leiden: Brill, 2014]). Carolyn Higbie's book contributes to this discussion by bringing together many of these approaches but also combining them with perspectives from anthropology and cultural studies. She aims to shed light on the relationship between people and the material world that surrounded them in antiquity, while at the same time offering a fascinating collection of stories and evidence regarding copyists, collectors and scholars in the ancient world. The main focus of the book is forgery in ancient Greek and Roman traditions; nevertheless, in order to explore this topic, the author starts with collectors and collecting as a major incentive for forgery. She aims to discuss how forgery was perceived in antiquity, how collecting and scholarship encouraged and facilitated [End Page 716] it, and thus moves beyond cultural hierarchies and intellectual understandings that have been prevalent in classical scholarship for decades. In addition, she aims to combine literary and material testimonies and to discuss forgery in a holistic way, as a phenomenon that brings together works of art in all media. Therefore, the book covers a broad range of areas and topics: from Greek and Roman traditions to written and visual resources. Furthermore, she uses analogies with personalities, resources, and circumstances of more recent periods not only to attract readers' attention and curiosity, but also to draw comparisons and identify patterns; thus, the book employs scholarship that has developed in other fields, such as anthropology, and museum and cultural studies. The book consists of four chapters. The first discusses collecting in the ancient world, using as a starting point and an analogy the case of Charles Townley, arguing that he and his contemporaries could offer a "partial model for Greek collectors of the Hellenistic era and for Roman collectors from the...

The glory of the Italian Renaissance came not only from Europe's Latin heritage, but also from the rich legacy of another renaissance - the palaeologan of late Byzantium. This nexus of Byzantine and Latin cultural and ecclesiastical relations in the Renaissance and Medieval periods is the underlying theme of the diverse and far-ranging essays in Constantinople and the Addressing the disputed, provocative question of Palaeologan influence on Italian Renaissance humanism, the author systematically demonstrates that Byzantine scholars were not merely transmitters of ancient Greek writings to the West. More significantly, the Byzantine emigre scholars in Italy, through their intimate knowledge of the Alexandrian and Byzantine traditions, alone were able to unlock and authentically interpret the more difficult texts of Aristotle, Plato, Hermogenes, and other Greek thinkers. Geanakoplos shows that the Byzantine refugee scholars and their Italian disciples were able to promote a fusion of elements of both the Italian and Palaeologan renaissances. Other essays concern the careers of influential Palaeologan humanists such as Theodore Gaza, the leading secular Aristotelian of the early Italian Renaissance, and John Argyropoulos, who was probably chiefly responsible for shifting the emphasis of Florentine humanism from rhetoric to Platonic philosophy. The essays in the second half of the book deal primarily with ecclesiastical relations. The author probes deeply into encounters between Greek and Roman churches at councils in Lyons, Florence, and elsewhere, which reflect the centuries of recurring religious schism and attempted reunion. He also offers a revealing glimpse of the Greek exaltation, and of Hagia Sophia and its properties, after Constantinople's liberation from Latin rule in 1261. While all of the essays have been printed previously, the author has revised and brought them entirely up to date for this volume. Constantinople and the West should be invaluable to those interested in the Byzantine and Italian Renaissance, and reward students of Medieval history, church history, and those who are interested in the comparative history of the East and West.