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Abstract
Theocritus’ language is an artificial dialectal mélange consisting in a conscious and highly original reuse of the varieties employed in the literature of the past: the Doric of choral lyric, the Aeolic of Sappho and Alcaeus, and the Ionic of epic. Although Doric features in the bucolic Idylls, and was identified as Theocritus’ leading dialect in antiquity (as shown by the spurious Idylls), it is impossible to set quick and easy rules for Theocritus’ use of each dialectal variety. In most cases, the Idylls consist in a careful balancing of elements from different dialects, a balance which itself varies from composition to composition. Theocritus’ language is a literary game, not an imitation of an actual variety of dialect. The charting of Theocritus’ use of dialects is also complicated by the large amount of variants for metrically equivalent features attested in the textual transmission.
Purism is a sociolinguistic phenomenon that attempts to counter the undesirable transformation or perceived decline of a language. Several examples of it are to be found in the history of the world’s languages, and one of the earliest is Greek Atticism: the promotion of Attic, the dialect of Classical Athens, as a prestige variety in opposition to common Greek (‘koine’). The means to achieve Attic purity were expounded in lexica such as Phrynichus’ Eclogue (2nd c. CE), which collected features to be cultivated or avoided in correct language. These works and their linguistic rules survived throughout Antiquity and later contributed to shaping the relationship between literary Byzantine Greek and spoken Medieval Greek.
Abstract
In the majority of Greek compounds the head occurs on the right. Within this system, a number of left-oriented categories are tolerated, chiefly preposition- and verb-first compounds, but also a handful of minor groups. This article aims to provide a more thorough appraisal of a specific subtype of left-oriented compounds: those showing an adjectival head (type ισóεoς, αξιoλoγoς, etc.). It first provides an overview of the various types of left-oriented compounds in Greek (section 2). It then assesses the claim that adjectival left-oriented compounds derive from left-oriented syntactic phrases by supplying a full corpus of such forms, and comparing them to existing syntagms of the type adjective plus noun (section 3). The subsequent sections investigate the autonomous morphological reasons behind the left-headedness of such compounds, which the syntactic model does not adequately explain. Section 4.1 addresses the question of why such compounds could not have been right-oriented. Section 4.2 identifies the morphological features which—as in the case of prepositional compounds—characterise adjectives in left-oriented compounds, and are largely responsible for their placement on the left.