Synchronic Variation and Historical Change in the West Greek Dialects

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GRAMMARS OF ANCIENT GREEK DIALECTS (Thumb-Kieckers, ThumbScherer, Buck, Lejeune, etc.) mention numerous instances of the geographical diffusion of linguistic features, but they venture only a few impressionistic statements regarding linguistic changes spreading from word to word (= lexical diffusion) and from one linguistic environment to another (= linguistic diffusion). The scholars studying these phenomena in Ancient Greek may create themselves a theoretical framework for this type of study on the basis of numerous recent studies from other languages. Currently, there has been an upsurge of interest in the study of phonological change in progress and its conditioning-suffice it to mention the study of lexical split of short a in Philadelphia by Labov (267-308), of multi-conditioned sound change in Spanish by Malkiel (757-779), and especially of phonological change of a and e to i in Classical Latin from a lexical diffusionist point of view by Janson (1977). The last-mentioned problem is a familiar one from all school books of Latin dealing with compounding-whether this particular "raising" occurs or not when a prefix is added to a verb depends on the verb. Thus this change occurs in all the compounds of rapiJ, cadj, capij, etc. but in none of the compounds of trahj, iacej, natJ, aperiJ, etc. There is a third group consisting of verbs which exhibit this change with certain prefixes but do not with other prefixes, e.g., ag6 (redigJ but peragJ), habej (cohibeJ but post-habe6), facij (conficij but calefaciJ). We may describe these facts by stating that this alternation is lexically conditioned-i.e., if rapij receives a prefix, the result is corripij, but if trahj does nothing changes in abstrahj, and finally we witness the vacillation with faciJ (conficij but calefacij). In the present paper I would like to examine the problem of geographical and morpholexical diffusion of the o-stem dative plural of -ovs to the athematic nouns (and iand eu-stems) as documented above all by numerous West Greek dialectal inscriptions from the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C. The study of morphological change in progress is of course nothing new in historical linguistics even if its theoretical basis has not as yet been satisfactorily laid down. Of the two cardinal theoretical concepts in this area-namely "analogy" and "lexical conditioning"-the former has been partly discredited by its overuse in many traditional treatments. On the other hand, the latter notion does not apear to be adequately exploited in the context of morphological innovation. We will see on the following pages that while the spread of -oswas in progress, the inscriptions present a picture