'
Ancient Greek', in
classical antiquity before the development of the
Koiné as the
lingua franca of
Hellenism, was divided into several '
dialects'. Likewise, '
Modern Greek' is divided into several dialects, most of them deriving from the Koiné.
Distribution of Greek dialects, ca.
400 BC, after Risch (1955).
Antiquity
Provenience
★ The earliest known dialect is '
Mycenaean Greek', the language reconstructed from the
Linear B tablets produced by the
Mycenaean civilization of the
Late Bronze Age in the late
2nd millennium BC. The classical distribution of dialects was brought about by the migrations of the early
Iron Age[1] after the collapse of the
Mycenaean civilization. Some speakers of Mycenaean were displaced to
Cyprus while others remained inland in
Arcadia, giving rise to the '
Arcadocypriot' dialect. This is the only dialect with a known Bronze-age precedent. The other dialects must have preceded their attested forms but the relationship of the precedents to Mycenaean remains to be discovered.
★ '
Aeolic' was spoken chiefly on the island of
Lesbos (
Lesbian) and the west coast of Asia Minor north of
Smyrna.
★ The
Dorian invasion spread '
Doric Greek' from a probable northwest Greece location to the coast of the
Peloponnesus; for example, to
Sparta, to
Crete and to the southernmost parts of the west coast of
Asia Minor. Doric was standard for Greek lyric poetry, such as
Pindar. 'North Western Greek' is sometimes classified as a separate dialect, and is sometimes subsumed under Doric. '
Macedonian' is regarded by some authors as another Greek dialect, possibly related to Doric or NW Greek.
[2].
★ '
Ionic' was mostly spoken along the west coast of Asia Minor, including Smyrna and the area to the south of it.
Homer's
Iliad and
Odyssey were written in '
Homeric Greek' (or Epic Greek), an early East Greek. '
Attic Greek', a sub- or sister-dialect of Ionic, was for centuries the language of
Athens. Because Attic was adopted in
Macedon before the conquests of
Alexander the Great and the subsequent rise of Hellenism, it became the "standard" dialect that evolved into the
Koiné.
Important authors
Important authors for the individual dialects include
Thucydides for Attic,
Herodotus and
Archilochos of Paros for Ionic,
Alcman and
Ibycus of Rhegium for Doric,
Sappho and
Alcaeus for Aeolic (Lesbian),
Corinna of Tanagra for Boiotic. Thessalic and Arcado-Cypriot never became literary dialects and are only known from inscriptions, and to some extent by the comical parodies of
Aristophanes. Epic Greek is a mixture of Aeolic, Doric and Attic-Ionic, according to
Dion Chrysostomus; however, the "Doric" elements are not actually Doric but rather archaisms within Aeolic.
Groups
The dialects of
Classical Antiquity are grouped slightly differently by various authorities.
Pamphylian is a marginal dialect of
Asia Minor and is sometimes left uncategorized. Note that Mycenaean was only deciphered in
1952, and is therefore missing from the earlier schemes presented here.
Problems of grouping
Greek dialects are defined as distinctive collections of linguistic features. The features individually are seldom distinctive, but are shared by different other dialects. Selection of a group is therefore to some degree arbitrary. However, the linguist defining the group usually begins from a geographic range with a center, such as Attic with center Athens.
The linguists of the competing divisions all took the reputations and political loyalties of the ancient speakers into consideration; for example, the ancient Greeks themselves recognized a distinction between Dorian and Athenian. To some degree every major city had an identifiable way of speaking.
The existence of Greek dialects can be explained by neither the Node Theory nor the Wave Theory alone. Leonard Bloomfield writes of the Node Theory:
[4]
: "At times, to be sure, history shows us a sudden cleavage …. A cleavage of this sort occurs when part of a community emigrates."
In the Node Theory, a parent population, or node, speaking an ancestor to all subsequent dialects, is presumed to have existed and sometimes is attested. The node for the Greek dialects would have been
Proto-Greek, but it is reconstructive only. The strongest candidates for the Node Theory are East Greek and West Greek, which have anciently recognized different geographical ranges.
In the Wave Theory, defined by Johannes Schmidt in 1872
[5],
: "Different linguistic changes may spread like waves over a speech-area…."
Most of the individual features are
isoglosses; that is, a map of only one feature crosses more than one nodal range. The linguists were therefore free to define the collection of isoglosses that seemed best to fit the ancient groups of speakers according to their own documents and beliefs.
Sound changes leading to dialectization
The ancient Greek dialects were primarily phonemic and vocalic; that is, the dialects were recognized mainly by differences in
vowels. These differences occurred as a result of the loss of intervocalic s, consonantal i and w from Proto-Greek. Such a loss brought two vocalic
phonemes into juxtaposition, a circumstance often called "collision of vowels".
[6] For unknown reasons Greek speakers regarded two vowels together as some sort of impropriety and over time changed pronunciation to avoid it. The way in which they changed determined the dialect.
For example, the word for the god of the sea (regardless of the culture and language from which it came) was in some prehistoric form Poseidāwōn, genitive Poseidāwonos, dative Poseidāwoni, etc. Loss of the intervocalic w left Poseidāōn, which is found in both Mycenaean and epic. Ionic changes the a to an e: Poseideōn, while Attic contracts to Poseidōn. Additional dialectization: Corinthian Potedāwoni, becoming Potedāni and Potedān; Boeotian Poteidāoni; Cretan, Rhodian and Delphian Poteidān; Lesbian Poseidān; Arcadian Posoidānos; Laconian Pohoidān. From the dialects it can easily be seen that these isoglosses do not follow any node structure at all.
The unconscious object of these changes appears mainly to be the creation of one phoneme from two, a process called "contraction" if a third phoneme is created, or "hyphaeresis" ("taking away") if one phoneme is dropped and the other kept. Sometimes the two phonemes are kept, or are kept and modified, as in the Ionic Poseideōn.
Another principle of vocalic dialectization follows the
Indo-European ablaut series or vowel grades.
Indo-European could interchange e (e-grade) with o (o-grade) or not use either (zero-grade). Similarly Greek inherited the series (for example) ei, oi, i, which are e,-, o- and zero-grades of the diphthong respectively. They could appear in different verb forms: leipo "I leave", leloipa "I have left", elipon "I left", or be used as the basis of dialectization: Attic deiknumi "I point out" but Cretan diknumi.
Post-Hellenistic
The ancient Greek dialects were a result of isolation and poor communication between communities living in broken terrain. No general Greek historian fails to point out the influence of terrain on the development of the city-states. Often in the development of languages dialectization results in the dissimilation of daughter languages. This phase did not occur in Greek; instead the dialects were replaced by standard Greek.
Increasing population and communication brought speakers more closely in touch and united them under the same authorities. Attic Greek became the literary language everywhere. Buck says
[7]:
: "… long after Attic had become the norm of literary prose, each state employed its own dialect, both in private and public monuments of internal concern, and in those of a more … interstate character, such as … treaties…."
In the first few centuries BCE regional dialects replaced local ones: North-west Greek koine, Doric koine and of course Attic koine. The latter came to replace the others in common speech in the first few centuries AD. After the division of the
Roman Empire into east and west the earliest modern Greek prevailed. The dialect distribution was then as follows:
★
Attic Greek
★
★
Koiné
★
★
★
Byzantine Greek language
★
★
★
★
Modern Greek
★
★
★
★
★
Demotic Greek
★
★
★
★
★
Katharevousa
★
★
★
★
Yevanic
★
★
★
★
Cypriot Greek
★
★
★
★
Cretan Greek
★
★
★
★
Griko (possibly with Doric elements)
★
★
Pontic Greek
★
★
Cappadocian Greek
★
★
Romano-Greek
★
Doric Greek
★
★
Tsakonian
Tsakonian is the only modern Greek dialect that is not descended from Attic or the Koiné.
Notes
1. Sometimes called the Greek Dark Ages because writing disappeared from Greece until the adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet.
2. It is as yet undetermined whether Macedonian was a separate yet sibling language which was most closely related to Greek, a dialect of Greek, or an independent Indo-European language not especially close to Greek.
3. First published in 1928, it was revised and expanded by Buck and republished in 1955, the year of his death. Of the new edition Buck said (Preface): "…this is virtually a new book." There have been other impressions, but, of course, no further changes to the text. The 1955 edition was at the time and to some degree still is the standard text on the subject in the United States. This part of the table is based on the ''Introduction'' to the 1955 edition. An example of a modern use of this classification can be found at columbia.edu as Richard C. Carrier's ''The Major Greek Dialects''
4. ''Language'', many editions and printings since 1933. This is a standard text on historical linguistics written by a scholar at the University of Chicago.
5. Bloomfield, work cited.
6. Two vocalic phonemes together are not to be confused with a diphthong, which is one more complex phoneme spelled with two letters. Diphthongs were typically inherited by Greek.
7. ''Greek Dialects''
External links
Overviews
★ ''
Griechische Dialekte und ihre Verteilung'', Titus site, in German. List, map, table of features.
★ ''
Dialects of Greek'', Kelley L. Ross. Map and brief description.
★ ''
Greek.'' Ethnologue report on modern Greek dialects and koine. Brief entries, catalog style.
★ Excerpts from Margalit Finkelburg, ''. One of the topics is the origin of the dialects.
Inscriptions
★ ''
Searchable Greek Inscriptions''. A considerable corpus of ancient Greek inscriptions in various dialects published by The Packard Humanities Institute.
★ ''
Inscriptions Listed by Region'', Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents site.
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