Lexical Translations in the Papyri: Koine Greek, Greek Dialects, and Foreign Languages*

Abstract

Abstract In general, literary papyrology does not offer the modern linguist much insight into the spoken language of the ancient Greeks, since a papyrus containing a literary text is by default a more controlled product than a documentary text. Unlike a private letter, petition, or contract, a literary papyrus is not a ‘living ‘ document and does not aim to convey practical information. Rather, it is a copy of a text that was often first written some centuries earlier and in a standardized literary language. Moreover, the scribe of a literary text has a particular ‘intellectual ‘ interest; hence his level of education can generally be assumed to be higher than that of the ‘author ‘ of a private document. This is not to say that literary papyri do not contain the usual misspellings which arose in the Hellenistic and Roman periods as a result of changes in pronunciation; of course they do, but no more so than documentary texts.