In this paper I study the possibility of an Egyptian Greek variety thaton the phonological level - developed from the 2 nd century CE onward, and which has so far not been defined as an independent language variety. Some preliminary remarks on this have been made, based on the great amount of features present in Greek in Egypt potentially stemming from the contact with Egyptian. Greek texts from Egypt display a substantial amount of nonstandard variation on all linguistic levels. In this paper I investigate the phonological level, concentrating on vowel orthography. Preliminary results of my study indicate Coptic phonological influence in, for example, the allophonic distribution of unstressed vowels, the tendency for consonant--to--vowel coarticulatory effects, and transfer of the Egyptian stress system. Parallel material can be found in the nonstandard usage of Greek loanwords in Coptic, which are used as a comparison for the Greek nonstandard writing forms. In order to be able to differentiate between Coptic impact and Greek internal phonological variation in the analysis of the phonetic variants, Coptic phoneme qualities are compared to the nonstandard renderings of Arabic loanwords in Coptic which display the same phenomena as the Greek ones. Egyptian Greek variety188; 200-201). Hence, for the most part, documents were produced by second language users with varying levels of Greek competence; some could write perfect Greek, and others less so. This is evident in an array of misspellings and, for example, confusion in the use of the Greek case system. Since Egyptian did not have case inflection, this particular aspect of Greek was alien to the Egyptian writers, who often either used the nominative for all purposes or relied on guesswork in choosing the case (Leiwo 2003, 5--7). Similarly, while much of the writing was according to the Greek standard, when there was nonstandard orthographic variation in the writing of the Egyptians, it often revealed features of their L1 phonological system.This situation creates fruitful ground for studying nonstandard variation and reveals transfer from Egyptian to Greek on all linguistic levels. The occurrence of (morpho)syntactic transfer has been verified for example in relative clause constructions (Vierros 2012, 177--194). Misspellings present in nonstandard orthography have their basis in phonology, and paint a clear picture of some of the well--known Greek developments, such as monophthongisation, the loss of vowel quantity, and the raising and fronting of close--mid unrounded [e̝ ] and close rounded vowels, [y, ø] to [i]. One of the key issues is that there are few Greek texts available outside of Egypt from the post--Classical periodtext production had been transferred to papyrus and other perishable materials, and only Egypt has soil dry enough to preserve texts in large quantities. Therefore, it cannot be taken as a given that all the phonological variation is of Greek internal origin. In fact, taking into account that a language contact situation existed, it is...
The Greek texts from Egypt show extensive nonstandard vowel production, which could cause inadvertent confusion in e.g. Greek mood or case endings. This has previously been seen as evidence of a bad command of Greek, either because of internal phonological change or due to imperfect knowledge of Greek. On closer look numerous similarities to the nonstandard vowel production in Greek texts can also be found in native Egyptian texts. Greek loanwords in Coptic are treated according to Coptic phonological rules and show nonstandard vowel usage of the same nature that is present in Greek in some sociolects. The nonstandard spellings present evidence of underdifferentiation of Greek phonemes as well as transfer elements of the Egyptian prosodic system. The vowel usage is examined within the framework of L2WS (second language writing systems) studies, and evidence for the coarticulatory effect of the consonants on the vowels' quality is drawn from the field of articulatory phonetics.
The Egyptian-Greek contact situation has lasted almost a thousand years and many documents have been preserved to us from this period. In this paper, we apply a new quantitative approach to this rich corpus of documentary papyri to map the relationships between the linguistic variables (the variant spellings) and several non-linguistic variables. A multidimensional scaling of the co-occurrences of the linguistic variables shows that there is a strong association between most of the Greek variant spellings that can be explained by Egyptian phonological transfer, while others do not typically co-occur with them. Several new linguistic variables not yet connected to Egyptian phonological transfer also show a strong relation with the first group of features, some of them representing the same phonological transfer processes. A comparison of the contexts in which these variables are used allows us to further substantiate this observation: several of the previously and newly Egyptian-associated variables turn out to have a strong correlation with bilingual Egyptian-Greek documents or occur in Egyptian dominated environments. The spelling variants are chronologically dependent and different features are typically associated with different historical periods illustrating changes taking place in the Egyptian Greek contact variety over time. A multiple correspondence analysis shows that the variables strongly interact, illustrating the importance of a multifactorial approach combining various linguistic and non-linguistic factors.
This volume is a collection of twenty-nine papers that had their preliminary presentation at the 9th International Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics (ICAGL9) that took place in Helsinki 28 August – 1 September, 2018. Thus they show exciting new lines of research in the field of Ancient Greek linguistics, where many approaches take advantage of current linguistic methods and theories. The Helsinki colloquium had two themes: 1) Language contact between Greek and other languages and 2) Linguistic research on original documents and manuscripts. The majority of the papers in this volume focus on these themes, many of them on both. However, Ancient Greek linguistic research from all angles, synchronically as well as diachronically studied, was welcomed. Consequently, all levels and many topics regarding language analysis – morphology, syntax, modality discourse analysis, semantics as well as pragmatics - were presented in the contributions by scholars ranging from those beginning their academic careers ro those with already well established names in the field.
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