Io Manolessou – författare

The Greek language has a written history of more than 3,000 years. While the classical, Hellenistic and modern periods of the language are well researched, the intermediate stages are much less well known, but of great interest to those curious to know how a language changes over time. The geographical area where Greek has been spoken stretches from the Aegean Islands to the Black Sea and from Southern Italy and Sicily to the Middle East, largely corresponding to former territories of the Byzantine Empire and its successor states. This Grammar draws on a comprehensive corpus of literary and non-literary texts written in various forms of the vernacular to document the processes of change between the eleventh and eighteenth centuries, processes which can be seen as broadly comparable to the emergence of the Romance languages from Medieval Latin. Regional and dialectal variation in phonology and morphology are treated in detail.

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.