Greece’s labyrinth of language A study in the early modern discovery of dialect diversity Raf Van Rooy language History and Philosophy of the Language science press Sciences 2 History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Editor: James McElvenny In this series: 1. McElvenny, James (ed.). Form and formalism in linguistics. 2. Van Rooy, Raf. Greece’s labyrinth of language: A study in the early modern discovery of dialect diversity. ISSN: 2629-172X Greece’s labyrinth of language A study in the early modern discovery of dialect diversity Raf Van Rooy language science press Van Rooy, Raf. 2020. Greece’s labyrinth of language: A study in the early modern discovery of dialect diversity (History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences 2). Berlin: Language Science Press. This title can be downloaded at: http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/253 © 2020, Raf Van Rooy Published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence (CC BY 4.0): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ISBN: 978-3-96110-210-5 (Digital) 978-3-96110-211-2 (Hardcover) ISSN: 2629-172X DOI:10.5281/zenodo.3478142 Source code available from www.github.com/langsci/253 Collaborative reading: paperhive.org/documents/remote?type=langsci&id=253 Cover and concept of design: Ulrike Harbort Typesetting: Nina Markl, Felix Kopecky Proofreading: Alexis Pierrard, Amir Ghorbanpour, Aniefon Daniel, Annie Zaenen, Conor Pyle, Felix Kopecky, Ivica Jeđud, Gerald Delahunty, Ludger Paschen, Jean Nitzke, Tom Bossuyt, Trinka D’Cunha, Vasiliki Foufi Fonts: Libertinus, Arimo, DejaVu Sans Mono Typesetting software:Ǝ X LATEX Language Science Press Unter den Linden 6 10099 Berlin, Germany langsci-press.org Storage and cataloguing done by FU Berlin To my parents, whose love speaks its own dialect Contents Preface v Acknowledgments vii Editorial choices ix 1 Introduction 1 1.1 The history of the Greek language in a nutshell ......... 1 1.2 The dialects of ancient Greece in premodern scholarship: A ty- pology of sources .......................... 4 1.3 Content in context .......................... 8 2 Order in chaos? Classifications of Greek dialects 11 2.1 Between mythology and dialectology ............... 11 2.2 Four or five dialects? The two major dialect classifications in Greek scholarship .......................... 13 2.3 The Koine in Greek scholarship .................. 13 2.4 Zooming in: Below the level of dialect ............... 15 2.5 The Greek dialects in the ancient and medieval Latin world ... 16 2.6 Tradition and innovation: Old classifications and a new principle 19 2.7 The invention of a poetical dialect ................. 24 2.8 Adapting traditional classifications ................ 27 2.9 The Koine, an eternal problem? .................. 30 2.10 Test case: Classifying vernacular Greek dialects ......... 34 2.11 Conclusion .............................. 36 3 A true man of letters: Greek dialects and philology 39 3.1 The basic motivation: Reading Greek poetry ........... 39 3.2 The dialects for the advanced philologist ............. 40 3.2.1 Etymology .......................... 41 3.2.2 Textual criticism ...................... 42 3.2.3 Writing Greek poetry ................... 43 3.3 Labyrinths and enigmas ....................... 44 3.4 Conclusion: Dialectology as an ancillary subfield of Greek phi- lology ................................. 47 Contents 4 Dialects in the mixer: Homeric and Biblical Greek 49 4.1 Homeric Greek: Puzzling scholars since antiquity ........ 49 4.2 In Plutarch’s footsteps: Renaissance ideas on Homer’s speech . 54 4.3 Toward a historical solution .................... 56 4.4 The struggle with Biblical Greek .................. 58 4.5 New Testament Greek as a dialect mixture ............ 60 4.6 Biblical Greek, a Hellenistic dialect? ................ 64 4.7 Conclusion .............................. 66 5 Old, older, oldest: Writing the linguistic history of Greek 67 5.1 The linguistic history of Greek in ancient and medieval scholarship 68 5.2 In Strabo’s wake ........................... 70 5.3 The dialects between Greek and biblical genealogy ....... 71 5.4 The early stages of the Greek language .............. 72 5.5 The later fate of the Greek dialects: Extinction and vestiges ... 74 5.6 Aeolism and its early modern transformations .......... 78 5.7 The Greek dialects in relation to other tongues .......... 80 5.8 By way of conclusion: Linguistic histories of Greek ....... 81 6 Using words like wax: The many mutations of the Greek dialects 83 6.1 Dialects and the pathology of words ................ 83 6.2 The heritage of pathology ..................... 85 6.3 Beyond letter changes ........................ 90 6.4 Debating dialectal features ..................... 91 6.5 Conclusion .............................. 94 7 Picturing ancient Greece through the dialects 97 7.1 Texts and tribes ........................... 97 7.2 Dialect attitudes from antiquity to early modernity ....... 99 7.3 Evaluative discourse between Greek and the vernacular ..... 110 7.4 Beyond the early modern era .................... 111 7.5 Geography, politics, and natural disposition ........... 112 7.6 Reconstructing ancient Greece: Antiquarians on the dialects .. 114 7.7 Conclusion .............................. 119 8 The Greek dialects in confrontation 121 8.1 The vernaculars of Western Europe and the Greek reflex .... 122 8.1.1 Explanation: The Greek dialects in need of clarification . 122 8.1.2 Justification and description: Greek as a polyvalent model 128 ii Contents 8.1.3 Dissociation: The particularity of the Greek dialects fore- grounded .......................... 137 8.1.4 Synthesis .......................... 141 8.2 Latin: Uniquely uniform or diversified like Greek? ........ 143 8.3 The Oriental language family and the Greek dialects ....... 146 8.3.1 The Oriental dialects .................... 146 8.3.2 Hebrew dialects ....................... 148 8.3.3 Summary .......................... 149 8.4 Conclusion: Between exemplarity and particularity ....... 150 9 Conclusion 153 Primary sources 161 Secondary literature 193 Index 209 Name index ................................. 209 Language index .............................. 219 Subject index ................................ 223 iii Preface In his twenty books on education, the renowned Spanish philologist and human- ist pedagogue Juan Luis Vives (1492/1493–1540) warned students of the Ancient Greek language of its great difficulty and diversity: In the Greek language, there are great labyrinths and enormously vast re- cesses, not only in the various dialects, but in every one of them. The Attic dialect and the common one, which is very close to Attic, are especially nec- essary, because they are also the most eloquent and cultivated. And what- ever the Greeks have that is worthy of reading and knowing is recorded in these dialects. The remaining dialects are used by the authors of poems, but it is less important to understand these.1 As a kind of Ariadne, Vives endeavored to guide the reader of his book, his Theseus, through the vast labyrinth of the Greek tongue. In order to make sure that prospective Hellenists learned the language as efficiently as possible, he sug- gested that they should focus on the Attic dialect and on Koine Greek, both for intellectual and esthetic reasons. Dialects such as Doric and Aeolic, primarily poetical media, were deemed to be of lesser importance. Vives left no doubt as to the immense diversity within the Greek language, which posed an enormous challenge not only to students but also to scholars in the early modern era. Fascinated with the heritage of ancient Greece, early modern intellectuals cultivated a deep interest in its language, the primary gate- way to this long-lost culture, rediscovered by Westerners during the Renaissance. The humanist battle cry “Ad fontes!” – Latin for “To the sources!” – forced them to take a detailed look at the Greek source texts in the original language and its different dialects. In doing so, they saw themselves confronted with several major linguistic questions. Is there any order in this great diversity? Can the 1Vives (1531: e3v): “In Graeca magni sunt labyrinthi et uastissimi recessus, non solum in dialectis uariis, sed in unaquaque illarum. Attica et Atticae proxima communis maxime sunt necessariae, propterea quod et sunt facundissimae atque excultissimae, et quicquid Graeci habent legi ac cognosci dignum istis dialectis est consignatum. Reliquis utuntur auctores carminum, quos non tanti est intelligi”. Preface Greek dialects be classified into larger groups? Is there a hierarchy among the dialects? Which dialect is the oldest? Where should problematic varieties such as Homeric and Biblical Greek be placed? How are the differences between the Greek dialects to be described, charted, and explained? What is the connection between the diversity of the Greek tongue and the Greek homeland? And, last but not least, are Greek dialects similar to the dialects of the vernacular tongues? Why (not)? In the present book, I discuss and analyze the often surprising and sometimes contradictory early modern answers to these questions. vi Acknowledgments The present book is a thoroughly revised version of a substantial part of my PhD dissertation, defended in May 2017 (Van Rooy 2017). As such, it is an outcome of a four-year PhD fellowship, generously granted by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) and conducted at KU Leuven, my main alma mater. The research leading up to this monograph was carried out in the best possible circumstances at the Leuven Center for the Historiography