The Greek Language after Antiquity: Advances and Challenges in Historical Linguistics

— —

David Holton Io Manolessou

The Greek Language after Antiquity

Advances and Challenges in Historical Linguistics

David Holton, Io Manolessou

$305

Hardback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

Availability Information

We source books from suppliers in Australia and overseas. For books we don't currently have in stock, the time it takes to get them from our suppliers can vary widely - from a few days to a few months - so we check each book with each supplier to determine the expected time it will take to be supplied to us.

We then advise you accordingly. If the time taken to get any book is too long for you, you can let us know and we will cancel or adjust your order, and refund as required.

To find out the anticipated arrival time for specific items prior to ordering, please contact us by phone or email:

Phone +61 2 9264 3111, or 1800 4 BOOKS (1800 4 26657) if outside Sydney:
option 1 Abbey's Bookshop (Crime, History, Science, Kids & more) • info@abbeys.com.au
option 2 Language Book Centre (ESL & Foreign Languages) • language@abbeys.com.au
option 3 Galaxy Bookshop (Sci-fi, Fantasy, Romance, Graphic Novels) • sf@galaxybooks.com.au

QTY:

English

Routledge
31 March 2025

Historical & comparative linguistics; Language Teaching (non-ELT); Ancient history: to c 500 CE

Series: British School at Athens - Modern Greek and Byzantine Studies

The Greek Language after Antiquity offers an in-depth look at the diachrony of the Greek language, focusing on a period relatively neglected by modern scholarship: the more than 1,000 years between the end of Antiquity and the early modern period. These studies, written by experts in the field, target different levels of analysis (phonology, morphology, semantics, lexicon, dialectology, sociolinguistics), combining substantial primary data with various theoretical approaches.

It begins with a radical proposal for a different approach to the historical linguistics of Greek, focused on the process of language diversification, as opposed to the traditional genetic approach to dialect emergence. Other topics include register variation in Byzantine literature, crucial for understanding the subsequent evolution of a written standard; morphological variation in conjunction with problems of textual transmission in medieval and early modern vernacular texts, with special focus on the notion of “philology”; evidence for language contact in the Late Medieval period; and the use of graphemic evidence, i.e. spelling, to detect changes in pronunciation over a long time span. Two chapters examine issues of word formation: one presents a new research project on diachronic derivational morphology; the other examines compound formation in the Cretan dialect. The final chapter examines theoretical and methodological issues in studying the historical semantics of Greek.

This book is essential reading for researchers in Greek historical linguistics and especially useful for students, teachers and researchers in Classics, Byzantine studies and general linguistics, with important connections to the historical linguistics and text-critical studies of other languages, particularly Romance and Turkish.

Edited by: David Holton, Io Manolessou
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 600g
ISBN: 9781032427348
ISBN 10: 1032427345
Series: British School at Athens - Modern Greek and Byzantine Studies
Pages: 214
Publication Date: 31 March 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Introduction David Holton and Io Manolessou 1. The regional diversification of Greek AD Io Manolessou 2. Investigating the diachronic phonology of Medieval and Modern Greek through graphemic evidence Nikolaos Pantelidis 3. Language contact in Late Medieval Greek: an under-estimated phenomenon? Theodore Markopoulos 4. Philology and φιλολογία: linguistic variation in Medieval and Early Modern Greek from the viewpoint of textual scholarship Tina Lendari 5. Many linguistic ways to tell the same story: the four versions of the Life of Maximos the Hutburner Martin Hinterberger 6. Medieval and Early Modern Greek derivational morphology: the missing chapters Tina Lendari and Io Manolessou 7. Compounding in Cretan across centuries Angela Ralli and George Chairetakis 8. Issues in the historical semantic analysis of Modern Greek Christina Bassea-Bezantakou

David Holton is Emeritus Professor of Modern Greek at the University of Cambridge and an Emeritus Fellow of Selwyn College. He has published widely on Greek language and literature from Late Medieval to Modern, particularly Cretan and Cypriot poetry of the Renaissance period. He edited Literature and Society in Renaissance Crete (1991; Greek edition 1997). He is the co-author of two grammars of Modern Greek, and he directed the research project that produced The Cambridge Grammar of Medieval and Early Modern Greek (4 vols., 2019). He holds an honorary doctorate from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2024). Io Manolessou is the Acting Director of the Research Centre for Modern Greek Dialects of the Academy of Athens. She holds a PhD in historical linguistics from the University of Cambridge and has published many papers on the history of the Greek language and its dialects. Major contributions include the Cambridge Grammar of Medieval and Early Modern Greek (co- author, 2019), vol. 7 of the Historical Dictionary of Modern Greek (chief editor, 2021), and the Historical Dictionary of the Dialects of Cappadocia (chief editor, 2024).