History of the Greek language

Throughout the centuries Byzantium's ambitious authors were conscious of the significance of literary registers for the reception of their texts. They deliberately made use of stylistic elements or refrained from using certain features in order to reach their target audience. There are certain groups of texts dating from various periods where these stylistic elements can be tracked precisely by comparison of two or even more versions with their model text. Such examples of rewriting can be found particularly within genres with a broader audience appeal namely hagiography and historiography. It is in both genres that we encounter metaphrastic processes in terms of stylistic elaboration and in terms of stylistic simplification.

As well as stylistic reshaping metaphrasis may also encompass the addition or removal of literary and/or thematic aspects. All these processes signify intent as well as authorial interpretation. Frequently the ideological orientation of a text is refurbished through rewriting. Teasing out these strands for exploration helps to supply a potential wealth of information on the author (if known) cultural (social religious historical) context and creative ability as well as levels of education and literacy.

Built on a highly traditional educational system the language of Byzantine literature was for the most part written in an idiom deeply influenced by ancient Greek texts and grammatical handbooks. The resulting overall archaizing impression of Byzantine Greek is largely why the language of learned literature - as compared with the relatively well researched vernacular literature - has seldom been taken seriously as an object of linguistic study. This volume combines the expertise of linguists and scholars of Byzantine literature to challenge the assumption that learned mediaeval Greek is merely the weary continuation of ancient Greek or worse still a poor imitation of it while proposing that it needs to be treated as a literary idiom in its own right.

The contribution that texts of this kind can offer to sub-fields of Greek historical linguistics is explored using specific examples. Sociolinguistic theory provides a particularly useful framework for a more accurate analysis of the relationship between the vernacular and classicizing varieties of Greek literary language. In addition the impact of the educational system on the production of texts is examined. In another chapter it is shown that a number of far-reaching assumptions which originated in the 15th century about accentuation and the middle voice still tend to colour our understanding of Byzantine as well as ancient Greek. Other chapters focusing on particles the dative and the synthetic perfect reveal that Byzantine authors while of course influenced by the living spoken language used their classical linguistic heritage in a creative and innovative way.