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What is the source for the periodization "Late Greek"? Horrocks, in his standard history of Greek, doesn't use it, [1] and neither does Browning in his Medieval and Modern Greek. [2]
The descriptive adjective "late" is very rarely applied to the language, and usually is applied to "late Greek art", "late Greek philosophy", "late Greek writers", etc. There are a very few cases I have found it being used: Veitch, 1871, Higgins, 1945, Anlauf, 1960, Lee 1980, but that's it.
The only extended discussion I can find of this category is in Higgins, where he defines "Standard Late Greek" as distinguished from the Koine (being more Atticising) and "standard" in the sense that it is fairly uniform. [3] It is essentially an Atticizing register of Koine characterized in particular by the use of modals in hypotheticals, quite different from what this article uses as a definition.
The crucial point is that other scholars do not seem to have taken up his terminology, regardless of what is recorded in tertiary sources like dictionaries.
In any case, I think it would make sense to merge this in to one of our existing articles, e.g., Byzantine literature (or maybe something else...). -- Macrakis ( talk) 14:22, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
Whatmough 1944 also treats of grammatical differences between Late Greek and other forms. Cameron 1970 also deals with "late Greek poetry" and cites Barnes 1967 as speaking of "late Greek occasional poetry". Where is the evidence that these "late Greek" genres are Koine? The authorities generally refer to Koine as a thing apart. GPinkerton ( talk) 13:43, 30 August 2020 (UTC)Greek changed more slowly than Latin. In Late Antiquity, Greek remained, as at the beginning of its history, a language based on a rich system of inflections (variable endings on words), and remains so even today. Nevertheless, it can be inferred that several profound and widespread changes occurred in Greek between the Classical period and Late Antiquity.
Furthermore, in the East Roman world (and even after the fall of Constantinople) there was sustained inter-ethnic contact and bilingualism, which resulted in the development of shared features among the languages of the wider Balkans, in Greek and, to a variable extent, Bulgarian, Romanian/Aroumanian, Serbian, Albanian, Turkish, and Romany.
However, the educated classes (to which many extant Greek authors belonged) in their writing shunned the spoken Greek of their time. The written language in the Late Antique period displays a range of archaizing styles, mostly reproducing strict Attic or literary Koiné, less commonly using an approximation to contemporary speech with added features from the formal language.
As a result, although we have texts from all periods of the history of Greek, the Greek of Late Antiquity is not fully documented. While untutored spoken Greek became increasingly different from Classical Greek, the written language mostly imitated Attic and styles of Koiné. Exceptions before the 11th century were few and somewhat partial, in that they did not accept all features of contemporary Greek. Such texts include the Chronicle of John Malalas (6th cent.), or the De Administrando Imperio by Constantine Porphyrogenitus (10th cent.). From the 12th century, compositions arguably close to vernacular Greek (mostly poetry, based on oral traditions) became more common, but their vocabulary and morphology present a remarkable multiplicity of forms, and we cannot tell whether the older forms they contain were still used in speech. Classical orthography was generally retained, despite significant shifts in pronunciation.
Greek grammar
Between the Classical and the Late Antique periods, spoken Greek underwent profound changes. Some had started very early, especially in Ionic Greek.
Long /e/ (spelt ei) moved towards the sound /i/; by the 1st century bc, /ai/ became /æ/; by the Roman imperial age, diphthongs consisting of long vowels +/i/ lost the /i/, while vowel length distinction faded, and the pitch accent of Ancient Greek became a stress accent. The open sound of the letter η eventually merged with /i/, and the second element in the diphthongs /au/ and /eu/ came to be pronounced as /v/ or /f/. Aspirated plosives and, by the 4th century ad, voiced plosives became fricatives: /ph/>/f/; /th/>/θ/; /kh/>/x/; /b/>/v/; /d/>/ð/; /g/>/γ/. Initial /h/ faded, and initial unstressed vowels were frequently elided.
The old conjugation of -mi verbs was increasingly replaced by the -ō type; the perfect and the aorist tense merged, the former being discarded; the optative mood, the future tense, the dual number, and the dative case became obsolete; the second aorist tense forms were replaced with those of the first; the morphologically distinct middle voice of verbs also fell into disuse. Many nouns with unusual declensions were replaced entirely or declined according to more common declensions. The infinitive mostly gave way to finite constructions, and the largely free word order was replaced by Verb-Subject-Object or Subject-Verb-Object. New words, including many adopted from Latin, appeared.
Yes, I agree that Koine may be the wrong thing to merge with. Perhaps it should be Atticism or better Atticizing Greek, following John A.L. Lee's "The Atticist Grammarians" [1]. If we believe that Lee, Higgins, and Vessella are talking about the same thing, and if we base our definition on them, we come up with an article along the following lines, which should be merged with the existing Atticism article:
This makes it a register of Greek during a certain period, not a periodization. GP says "Even if no scholars had taken up the terminology, the number of scholarly works mentioned by Macrakis should be plenty to form the basis of a standalone article." That's not the way WP is supposed to work. We're supposed to find the best sources and use the most common name for things. Our sources agree that there is an Atticizing register of Greek in this period. Search tools make it easy to find sources which use the term "Late Greek", but that may not be the most widely used term. As for the English dictionaries, those are very weak sources, partly because they're tertiary, partly because they only give sketchy definitions of the terms. What is the full reference for your Whatmough 1944? I find "Up from Gilgal" and "ΚΕΛΤΙΚΑ...dialects of ancient Gaul", but those don't seem relevant. As for the argument by parallelism with Late Latin, we're not supposed to make up our own terminology if we can avoid it.... -- Macrakis ( talk) 14:16, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
I have asked for input from the Linguistics and the Classical Greece and Rome Wikiprojects. Maybe they can help us out. -- Macrakis ( talk) 17:08, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
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What is the source for the periodization "Late Greek"? Horrocks, in his standard history of Greek, doesn't use it, [1] and neither does Browning in his Medieval and Modern Greek. [2]
The descriptive adjective "late" is very rarely applied to the language, and usually is applied to "late Greek art", "late Greek philosophy", "late Greek writers", etc. There are a very few cases I have found it being used: Veitch, 1871, Higgins, 1945, Anlauf, 1960, Lee 1980, but that's it.
The only extended discussion I can find of this category is in Higgins, where he defines "Standard Late Greek" as distinguished from the Koine (being more Atticising) and "standard" in the sense that it is fairly uniform. [3] It is essentially an Atticizing register of Koine characterized in particular by the use of modals in hypotheticals, quite different from what this article uses as a definition.
The crucial point is that other scholars do not seem to have taken up his terminology, regardless of what is recorded in tertiary sources like dictionaries.
In any case, I think it would make sense to merge this in to one of our existing articles, e.g., Byzantine literature (or maybe something else...). -- Macrakis ( talk) 14:22, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
Whatmough 1944 also treats of grammatical differences between Late Greek and other forms. Cameron 1970 also deals with "late Greek poetry" and cites Barnes 1967 as speaking of "late Greek occasional poetry". Where is the evidence that these "late Greek" genres are Koine? The authorities generally refer to Koine as a thing apart. GPinkerton ( talk) 13:43, 30 August 2020 (UTC)Greek changed more slowly than Latin. In Late Antiquity, Greek remained, as at the beginning of its history, a language based on a rich system of inflections (variable endings on words), and remains so even today. Nevertheless, it can be inferred that several profound and widespread changes occurred in Greek between the Classical period and Late Antiquity.
Furthermore, in the East Roman world (and even after the fall of Constantinople) there was sustained inter-ethnic contact and bilingualism, which resulted in the development of shared features among the languages of the wider Balkans, in Greek and, to a variable extent, Bulgarian, Romanian/Aroumanian, Serbian, Albanian, Turkish, and Romany.
However, the educated classes (to which many extant Greek authors belonged) in their writing shunned the spoken Greek of their time. The written language in the Late Antique period displays a range of archaizing styles, mostly reproducing strict Attic or literary Koiné, less commonly using an approximation to contemporary speech with added features from the formal language.
As a result, although we have texts from all periods of the history of Greek, the Greek of Late Antiquity is not fully documented. While untutored spoken Greek became increasingly different from Classical Greek, the written language mostly imitated Attic and styles of Koiné. Exceptions before the 11th century were few and somewhat partial, in that they did not accept all features of contemporary Greek. Such texts include the Chronicle of John Malalas (6th cent.), or the De Administrando Imperio by Constantine Porphyrogenitus (10th cent.). From the 12th century, compositions arguably close to vernacular Greek (mostly poetry, based on oral traditions) became more common, but their vocabulary and morphology present a remarkable multiplicity of forms, and we cannot tell whether the older forms they contain were still used in speech. Classical orthography was generally retained, despite significant shifts in pronunciation.
Greek grammar
Between the Classical and the Late Antique periods, spoken Greek underwent profound changes. Some had started very early, especially in Ionic Greek.
Long /e/ (spelt ei) moved towards the sound /i/; by the 1st century bc, /ai/ became /æ/; by the Roman imperial age, diphthongs consisting of long vowels +/i/ lost the /i/, while vowel length distinction faded, and the pitch accent of Ancient Greek became a stress accent. The open sound of the letter η eventually merged with /i/, and the second element in the diphthongs /au/ and /eu/ came to be pronounced as /v/ or /f/. Aspirated plosives and, by the 4th century ad, voiced plosives became fricatives: /ph/>/f/; /th/>/θ/; /kh/>/x/; /b/>/v/; /d/>/ð/; /g/>/γ/. Initial /h/ faded, and initial unstressed vowels were frequently elided.
The old conjugation of -mi verbs was increasingly replaced by the -ō type; the perfect and the aorist tense merged, the former being discarded; the optative mood, the future tense, the dual number, and the dative case became obsolete; the second aorist tense forms were replaced with those of the first; the morphologically distinct middle voice of verbs also fell into disuse. Many nouns with unusual declensions were replaced entirely or declined according to more common declensions. The infinitive mostly gave way to finite constructions, and the largely free word order was replaced by Verb-Subject-Object or Subject-Verb-Object. New words, including many adopted from Latin, appeared.
Yes, I agree that Koine may be the wrong thing to merge with. Perhaps it should be Atticism or better Atticizing Greek, following John A.L. Lee's "The Atticist Grammarians" [1]. If we believe that Lee, Higgins, and Vessella are talking about the same thing, and if we base our definition on them, we come up with an article along the following lines, which should be merged with the existing Atticism article:
This makes it a register of Greek during a certain period, not a periodization. GP says "Even if no scholars had taken up the terminology, the number of scholarly works mentioned by Macrakis should be plenty to form the basis of a standalone article." That's not the way WP is supposed to work. We're supposed to find the best sources and use the most common name for things. Our sources agree that there is an Atticizing register of Greek in this period. Search tools make it easy to find sources which use the term "Late Greek", but that may not be the most widely used term. As for the English dictionaries, those are very weak sources, partly because they're tertiary, partly because they only give sketchy definitions of the terms. What is the full reference for your Whatmough 1944? I find "Up from Gilgal" and "ΚΕΛΤΙΚΑ...dialects of ancient Gaul", but those don't seem relevant. As for the argument by parallelism with Late Latin, we're not supposed to make up our own terminology if we can avoid it.... -- Macrakis ( talk) 14:16, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
I have asked for input from the Linguistics and the Classical Greece and Rome Wikiprojects. Maybe they can help us out. -- Macrakis ( talk) 17:08, 31 August 2020 (UTC)