Greek dialects

From Freepedia

Image:Greek dialects.png Ancient Greek, in Classical Antiquity before the development of the Koine as the lingua franca of Hellenism, was divided into several dialects. Likewise, Modern Greek is divided into several dialects, most of them deriving from the Koine.

1 Antiquity
2 Post-Hellenistic
3 External links

Antiquity

The earliest known dialect is the Mycenaean language, the language spoken by the first hellenic settlers of the Greek mainland in the 2nd millennium BC.

The classical distribution of dialects was brought about by the migrations of the early Iron Age Greek Dark Ages after the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization. Some speakers of Mycenaean were displaced to Cyprus while others remained inland in Arcadia, giving rise to the Arcadocypriot dialect.

The Dorian invasion spread Doric Greek the coast of the Pelopennesus, for example of Sparta, Crete and the southernmost parts of the west coast of Asia Minor. Doric was standard for Greek lyric poetry, such as Pindar.

Aeolic was spoken chiefly on the island of Lesbos (Lesbian) and the west coast of Asia Minor north of Smyrna.

Ionic was mostly spoken along the west coast of Asia Minor, including Smyrna and the area to the south of it. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were written in a kind of literary Ionic with some loan words from the other dialects. Ionic, therefore, became the primary literary language of ancient Greece. Attic Greek, a sub- or sister-dialect of Ionic, was for centuries the language of Athens. Because Attic was adopted in Macedon before the conquests of Alexander the Great and the subsequent rise of Hellenism, it became the "standard" dialect that evolved into the Koine.

Important authors for the individual dialects include Thucydides for Attic, Herodotus and Archilochos of Paros for Ionian, Alcman and Ibycus of Rhegium for Doric, Sappho and Alcaeus for Aeolic (Lesbian), Corinna of Tanagra for Boiotic. Thessalic and Arcado-Cypriot never became literary dialects and are only known from inscriptions, and to some extent by the comical parodies of Aristophanes. The dialect of Homer is a mixture of several dialects. According to Dion Chrysostomus, a mixture of Aeolic, Doric and Attic-Ionic; however, the "Doric" elements are not actually Doric but rather archaisms within Aeolic.

The dialects of Classical Antiquity are grouped slightly differently by various authorities. Pamphylian is a marginal dialect of Asia Minor and usually left uncategorized. Note that Mycenaean was only deciphered in 1952, and is therefore missing from the earlier schemes presented here.