The Greek Language after Antiquity

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.
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