A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language

Egbert J. Bakker is Professor of Classics at Yale University. He is the author of Poetry in Speech: Orality and Homeric Discourse (1997) and Pointing at the Past: From Formula to Performance in Homeric Poetics (2005) and the co-editor with A. Kahane of Written Voices, Spoken Signs: Tradition, Performance, and Epic Text (1997). He has published widely on various aspects of the Greek language, in particular, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and speaking versus writing.

List of Figures viii List of Tables ix

Notes on Contributors xii

Symbols Used xviii

Abbreviations of Ancient Authors and Works xix

Abbreviations of Modern Sources xxviii

Linguistic and Other Abbreviations xxxv

1 Introduction 1
Egbert J. Bakker

PART I The Sources 9

2 Mycenaean Texts: The Linear B Tablets 11
Silvia Ferrara

3 Phoinikēia Grammata: An Alphabet for the Greek Language 25
Roger D. Woodard

4 Inscriptions 47
Rudolf Wachter

5 Papyri 62
Arthur Verhoogt

6 The Manuscript Tradition 69
Niels Gaul

PART II The Language 83

7 Phonology 85
Philomen Probert

8 Morphology and Word Formation 104
Michael Weiss

9 Semantics and Vocabulary 120
Michael Clarke

10 Syntax 134
Evert van Emde Boas and Luuk Huitink

11 Pragmatics: Speech and Text 151
Egbert J. Bakker

PART III Greek in Time and Space: Historical and Geographical Connections 169

12 Greek and Proto-Indo-European 171
Jeremy Rau

13 Mycenaean Greek 189
Rupert Thompson

14 Greek Dialects in the Archaic and Classical Ages 200
Stephen Colvin

15 Greek and the Languages of Asia Minor to the Classical Period 213
Shane Hawkins

16 Linguistic Diversity in Asia Minor during the Empire: Koine and Non-Greek Languages 228
Claude Brixhe

17 Greek in Egypt 253
Sofía Torallas Tovar

18 Jewish and Christian Greek 267
Coulter H. George

19 Greek and Latin Bilingualism 281
Bruno Rochette

PART IV Greek in Context 295

20 Register Variation 297
Andreas Willi

21 Female Speech 311
Thorsten Fögen

22 Forms of Address and Markers of Status 327
Eleanor Dickey

23 Technical Languages: Science and Medicine 338
Francesca Schironi

PART V Greek as Literature 355

24 Inherited Poetics 357
Joshua T. Katz

25 Language and Meter 370
Gregory Nagy

26 Literary Dialects 388
Olga Tribulato

27 The Greek of Epic 401
Olav Hackstein

28 The Language of Greek Lyric Poetry 424
Michael Silk

29 The Greek of Athenian Tragedy 441
Richard Rutherford

30 Kunstprosa: Philosophy, History, Oratory 455
Victor Bers

31 The Literary Heritage as Language: Atticism and the Second Sophistic 468
Lawrence Kim

PART VI The Study of Greek 483

32 Greek Philosophers on Language 485
Casper C. de Jonge and Johannes M. van Ophuijsen

33 The Birth of Grammar in Greece 499
Andreas U. Schmidhauser

34 Language as a System in Ancient Rhetoric and Grammar 512
James I. Porter

PART VII Beyond Antiquity 525

35 Byzantine Literature and the Classical Past 527
Staffan Wahlgren

36 Medieval and Early Modern Greek 539
David Holton and Io Manolessou

37 Modern Greek 564
Peter Mackridge

Bibliography 588

Index 639