Different Hellenic dialects

[Gladius Hispaniensis]

Ave

This might sound like an obvious question, but did the different Hellenic city states have a common dialect with which to communicate with each other? I know that Sparta and Athens spoke different dialects and the Macedonians had a dialect completely unique (which IIRC is the basis for koine Greek that became so widespread in antiquity) but when they communicated with each other for politics, trade, etc. did they adopt a particular regional dialect or was there a standard form of speech that all Greeks were familiar with?

[docoflove1974]

Yes, indeed, there were different dialects or even versions of Ancient Greek. There's a (very) brief discussion of this and other Indo-European language families on the University of Texas' Linguistics Research Center site. I don't have more on-hand (most of my books are packed up right now), but the following linguistic resources are good descriptions of both Latin and ancient Greek (they are heavy in linguistic jargon, so I do make that disclaimer. But any decent introductory linguistics book should be able to help you with the processes and terms, for the most part):

 

Buck, Carl Darling. 1933. Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

 

Sihler, Andrew. 1995. New Comparative Grammar of Latin and Greek. New York: Oxford University Press.

 

I don't know of anything that I can recommend specifically on Greek or the Hellenic languages in general--probably AD can do that--but this is a start not only on ancient Greek, but how Proto-Indo-European probably came to evolve into the Hellenic and Italic branches of language.

[Gladius Hispaniensis]

That is an excellent website Docoflove. I'll have something else to occupy myself with for the next couple of days! But the thrust of my question was - when different Greek city states communicated with each other, was there a common dialect they used as a lingua franca?

[Andrew Dalby]

That is an excellent website Docoflove. I'll have something else to occupy myself with for the next couple of days! But the thrust of my question was - when different Greek city states communicated with each other, was there a common dialect they used as a lingua franca?

It's an important question and I haven't ever seen much discussion of it -- in the earlier Greek period at any rate.

 

The dialects were very different from one another, as anyone knows who has tried to read Sappho and Alcaeus (who wrote in the Aeolic dialect of Lesbos). Even the dialect of Herodotus and 'Hippocrates' (Ionic) is significantly different from that of Athenian writers (Attic). And when you look at local inscriptions (official ones, that is -- laws etc.) the differences seem greater still.

 

I suspect that Greeks got more used to dealing with variant dialects that some other peoples because, as a seagoing nation, they have always done a lot of 'long distance' travel. Cross the Aegean in any direction and you would soon come to very different dialects, and that sort of journey was commonplace for lots of people even in ancient times. In addition to this, it became standard to connect different dialects with different genres of literature, and everyone had to go on understanding the Homeric epics, whose dialect was rather special too.

 

Now, eventually, out of this melting-pot of dialects and large scale migrations, a lingua franca -- the 'koine' -- did emerge. It was the usual everyday Greek in Hellenistic and Roman-Empire times, even though many prose writers went on writing what they thought of as 'proper Attic'. The New Testament is written in a form of the 'koine' -- the form that was no doubt typical of Palestine and Syria.

 

The koine is very definitely based on a toned-down kind of Attic (the dialect of Athens). Why, exactly? Athens was not the most important colonising city, not specially influential in Hellenistic or Roman times (except as a cultural centre), and not a major source of mercenary soldiers or migrants. If you find a book or website that discusses convincingly the question why the koine is so much closer to Attic than to other dialects, let me know. It's quite an important question, because the answer will tell us when, and among whom, the koine first began to develop.

[Pantagathus]

I know it's fictional but I love the way that Mary Renault worked around the problem in Bull from the Sea of how Theseus would initially communicate with Hippolyta buy using the language of the 'Shore Folk' (i.e. Pelasgian) as the initial common ground... ^_^

[Rameses the Great]

Would this be an issue with communication between Athenians and Spartans? Did they maybe even need translators?

[Andrew Dalby]

Would this be an issue with communication between Athenians and Spartans? Did they maybe even need translators?

The dialects are probably not quite as different as that. I imagine it as something like a Scot negotiating with an Alabaman ...

[Gladius Hispaniensis]

Now that I think of it, I remember Plutarch mentioning that the Spartans used a very terse form of speech. I believe the word laconic, in fact, is derived form Ladedaemonian.

[Julius Ratus]

Laconic refers to the tersity of their speach, not the linguistic differences. For a specific example of the differences between Doric (Spartan) and Attic Greek, in Plutarch's Moralia is a section called "The Sayings of Spartans". In this section he quotes a few line here and there in Doric Greek. I believe that Doric Greek had a few words different, and had a bit of a drawl to it. When the British translators of the Loeb books translate sentences from Doric they tent to write it in Scottish to show the difference. The problem with that for an American like me is that I can understand Greek better than Scottish!

 

(In the movie "Joeux Noel" about WWI, the Germans, Scots, and French all speak in their respective languages and I found myself wishing for subtitles when the Scotmen spoke. I swear I understood the Germans better, and I don't even know that much German.)

 

EDIT -- BTW, Laconic dosen't come from Lakedaimon, it comes from Lakonia. Lakonia was the area where Sparta was located. In U.S. terms, think of Sparta as a city, Lakedaimon as a county, and Lakonia as a state.

Edited March 7, 2007 by Julius Ratus

[Gladius Hispaniensis]

Laconic refers to the tersity of their speach, not the linguistic differences

Yes, I know that. That's what I meant.

EDIT -- BTW, Laconic dosen't come from Lakedaimon, it comes from Lakonia. Lakonia was the area where Sparta was located

I did not know that. Thanks for the correction.

[edgewaters]

It's not 100% on-topic, but I've always wondered something about Koine Greek. Were there any dialects in it? Obviously the users were mutually intelligible, but if someone from Massilia or the Black Sea area (assuming they spoke Koine there in the Roman period?) heard an Egyptian speaker, would he seem, to them, to sound strange or use odd phrases, syntax, etc?

[Gladius Hispaniensis]

Obviously I am indulging in a lot of speculation here but since Koine Greek was used more or less within the confines of Alexander's vast empire with it's enormous diversity of subject peoples I think they would have incorporated a lot of their local idioms within their Greek speech over the centuries, with the result that, during, say the time of Augustus, the Koine spoken in Egypt would have probably differed from what was spoken in Gandahara (modern Kandahar) in Afghanistan.

To imagine a parallel and more recent situation, imagine the English that was spoken throughout the British Empire. It would have been mutually intelligible to all Commonwealth subjects but each area would have incorporated it's own linguistic peculiarities. So, for example, in India today, many older generation folk will still use Victorian phrases like "to drop in for a spot of tea" or "old chap" etc., but they have some local twists of their own, like "to make both ends meet", etc.

[Andrew Dalby]

Obviously I am indulging in a lot of speculation here but since Koine Greek was used more or less within the confines of Alexander's vast empire with it's enormous diversity of subject peoples I think they would have incorporated a lot of their local idioms within their Greek speech over the centuries, with the result that, during, say the time of Augustus, the Koine spoken in Egypt would have probably differed from what was spoken in Gandahara (modern Kandahar) in Afghanistan.

To imagine a parallel and more recent situation, imagine the English that was spoken throughout the British Empire. It would have been mutually intelligible to all Commonwealth subjects but each area would have incorporated it's own linguistic peculiarities. So, for example, in India today, many older generation folk will still use Victorian phrases like "to drop in for a spot of tea" or "old chap" etc., but they have some local twists of their own, like "to make both ends meet", etc.

 

I haven't ever read much discussion of this point. It seems a very interesting one to me. There are certainly differences in the written Koine when it's written by non-literary types; for example, you can pick out influences from Semitic languages (Aramaic, no doubt Biblical Hebrew too) in New Testament authors such as Matthew and Mark (less so Luke and Paul, since they were probably better educated and more 'literary'). Not just borrowed words (such as Amen!) but also the way that sentences are formed. Originally, those influences would have to be specific to people who wrote Greek in Syria and Palestine, or to people who had a Jewish or Semitic-speaking background.

 

I think, in a similar way, you can pick out influences from Egyptian/Coptic in the Greek of the non-literary Egyptian papyri, letters, business documents, etc.

 

The trouble with the Greek West (Sicily, South Italy, Massilia, etc.) is that there's very little evidence of that kind. The other problem is that, in any case, part of your full Greek education was learning to write just like all other Greeks did. So how would we know if the Greek of Sicily or Massilia, under the Roman Empire, sounded different from the Greek of Greece, Anatolia, Syria, Egypt? I can't think of any source of information on this.