The Attic-Ionic dialects

Abstract

Abstract Attic-Ionic occupies a distinctive place among Ancient Greek dialect groups. It is both the best-attested group (by far) and the group that most obviously constitutes a clade in a reasonably strict sense of the term. This chapter discusses the origin and diversification of the Attic-Ionic dialect group, as well as distinctive changes that spread through the group after it was well diversified. The relative chronology of changes affecting the Attic dialect is discussed in detail, with references to earlier work, since our extensive attestation of Attic makes that relative chronology exceptionally easy to recover (thus providing a natural laboratory for studies of linguistic relative chronology in the distant past). Most of the chapter discusses phonological changes, but the (few) shared morphological changes are also treated, notably the origin and spread of secondary 3pl. -σαν.