Greece’s labyrinth of language: A study in the early modern discovery of dialect diversity

Description

Contents Preface Acknowledgments Editorial choices 1 Introduction 1.1 The history of the Greek language in a nutshell 1.2 The dialects of ancient Greece in premodern scholarship: A typology of sources 1.3 Content in context 2 Order in chaos? Classifications of Greek dialects 2.1 Between mythology and dialectology 2.2 Four or five dialects? The two major dialect classifications in Greek scholarship 2.3 The Koine in Greek scholarship 2.4 Zooming in: Below the level of dialect 2.5 The Greek dialects in the ancient and medieval Latin world 2.6 Tradition and innovation: Old classifications and a new principle 2.7 The invention of a poetical dialect 2.8 Adapting traditional classifications 2.9 The Koine, an eternal problem? 2.10 Test case: Classifying vernacular Greek dialects 2.11 Conclusion 3 A true man of letters: Greek dialects and philology 3.1 The basic motivation: Reading Greek poetry 3.2 The dialects for the advanced philologist 3.2.1 Etymology 3.2.2 Textual criticism 3.2.3 Writing Greek poetry 3.3 Labyrinths and enigmas 3.4 Conclusion: Dialectology as an ancillary subfield of Greek philology 4 Dialects in the mixer: Homeric and Biblical Greek 4.1 Homeric Greek: Puzzling scholars since antiquity 4.2 In Plutarch’s footsteps: Renaissance ideas on Homer’s speech 4.3 Toward a historical solution 4.4 The struggle with Biblical Greek 4.5 New Testament Greek as a dialect mixture 4.6 Biblical Greek, a Hellenistic dialect? 4.7 Conclusion 5 Old, older, oldest: Writing the linguistic history of Greek 5.1 The linguistic history of Greek in ancient and medieval scholarship 5.2 In Strabo’s wake 5.3 The dialects between Greek and biblical genealogy 5.4 The early stages of the Greek language 5.5 The later fate of the Greek dialects: Extinction and vestiges 5.6 Aeolism and its early modern transformations 5.7 The Greek dialects in relation to other tongues 5.8 By way of conclusion: Linguistic histories of Greek 6 Using words like wax: The many mutations of the Greek dialects 6.1 Dialects and the pathology of words 6.2 The heritage of pathology 6.3 Beyond letter changes 6.4 Debating dialectal features 6.5 Conclusion 7 Picturing ancient Greece through the dialects 7.1 Texts and tribes 7.2 Dialect attitudes from antiquity to early modernity 7.3 Evaluative discourse between Greek and the vernacular 7.4 Beyond the early modern era 7.5 Geography, politics, and natural disposition 7.6 Reconstructing ancient Greece: Antiquarians on the dialects 7.7 Conclusion 8 The Greek dialects in confrontation 8.1 The vernaculars of Western Europe and the Greek reflex 8.1.1 Explanation: The Greek dialects in need of clarification 8.1.2 Justification and description: Greek as a polyvalent model 8.1.3 Dissociation: The particularity of the Greek dialects foregrounded 8.1.4 Synthesis 8.2 Latin: Uniquely uniform or diversified like Greek? 8.3 The Oriental language family and the Greek dialects 8.3.1 The Oriental dialects 8.3.2 Hebrew dialects 8.3.3 Summary 8.4 Conclusion: Between exemplarity and particularity 9 Conclusion Primary sources Secondary literature Index Name index Language index Subject index