[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]
The history of the Greek language continues to challenge historical linguists, despite the vast range of sources that are available to trace its development across time, place and speakers. The most difficult challenge has been, and will no doubt remain, to provide equal coverage of all grammatical dimensions of the history of the Greek language (e.g., phonology, orthography, morphology, semantics, and syntax). The inherited preference for classical Greek and modern Greek has long been a stumbling block to this, but times have changed for the better for those working on post-classical and medieval Greek, not only due to sustained efforts from individual scholars, but also due to recent large-scale projects, such as dictionaries, grammars, and the publications of lesser known texts. In the present volume, edited and briefly introduced by David Holton and Io Manolessou, several scholars show that advances can be made to unravel grammatical developments in the period ‘after antiquity’, which is taken as the 6th to the 18th century. (Authors and titles are listed in the book’s table of contents at the end of the review.)
The first chapter, Io Manolessou outlines a novel research methodology to trace the gradual development of dialect diversification. Instead of retrospectively searching for the ‘genesis’ of modern Greek dialects, Manolessou argues that we should consider the origin and spread of innovative changes (comprising both appearance and loss of features). The main point that she makes is that the development of the Greek dialects cannot be seen as separate from the historical grammar of Greek in general: many features associated with dialects nowadays constituted points of divergence with respect to different periods and places in the past. As a result, ‘archaisms’ such as the retention of the infinitive are in her view much less instructive than commonly assumed, since they reveal little about the diachronic origin and differential spread of innovative changes of dialects. She also illustrates how neglected evidence from Christian inscriptions from early medieval Greek and contrastive evidence from different varieties can revise existing chronologies of dialectal features, in particular the relative use of ὅπου and the differential use of negators. Manolessou certainly makes a convincing case for a more comprehensive approach to dialect diversification. The only minor issue which I would like to point out here is that the approach which she advocates may inadvertently disregard textual evidence of changes that are ‘insignificant’ to the formations of modern Greek dialects but historically significant to other periods of the history of Greek, such as innovations lost to modern Greek dialects or diachronic dead-ends in the post-classical or medieval Greek period.
In chapter 2, Nikolaos Pantelidis tackles another challenge to historical linguists of Greek, how to reconstruct phonological developments from the partial and, at times, misleading evidence that is available to us. He focuses on two major phonological developments, the vowel change from ancient Greek υ [y] to modern Greek [i] and the fronting of velar stops. Pantelidis carefully contrasts evidence from metalinguistic comments, approximative graphemic renderings (e.g., ιου/ου), and recordings from the 1930s onwards. He shows convincingly that such combined evidence allows us to draw up a more complex chronological picture which a consideration of only the written evidence would not have rendered.
In chapter 3, Theodore Markopoulos seeks to offer a holistic framework for language contact in the late medieval Greek period. He first points out how scholars have neglected the effects of language contact on the histories of languages in the past, especially in traditional narratives of an unbroken continuity of the Greek language and, even more problematically, the Greek race. After pointing out significant gaps in our knowledge of language contact in the early medieval Greek period, Markopoulos turns to a period for which we have more evidence of language contact, including overlooked evidence. In two case studies focusing on medieval Cyprus and Rhodes, he describes the social and linguistic parameters that need to be incorporated and provides illustrations for the multilingual competence of rulers and tradesmen. The chapter is certainly programmatic, but more attention should perhaps have been devoted to the specific forms of corpus evidence for such multilingualism, especially beyond better known instances of lexical and syntactic borrowing.[1]
In chapter 4, Tina Lendari untangles the complex connections between textual philology and historical linguistics by analyzing competing variants for the pronoun/determiner αὐτός and the mediopassive third person plural ending –όντησαν. She demonstrates that (i) certain manuscripts containing different texts display distinct preferences for variants, (ii) different textual traditions may influence each other, and (iii) modern editors likewise may show preferences for different variants. The relationship between textual scholarship and historical linguistics hence is a reciprocal one, an ‘alliance’ (in her words) which can provide more balanced decisions on the value(s) of textual variants, their provenance and the roles played by scribes and editors. This chapter makes clear that we need an open access database in which these textual variants and their provenances are recorded for scholars, or at least a standard of recording them in editions where alternative and potentially more relevant variants remain accessible to future scholars.
In chapter 5, Martin Hinterberger offers a detailed comparison of four versions of the Life of Maximos the Hutburner and illustrates that metaphrases are an ideal tool to establish the range of variation possible across lower/higher registers and grammatical domains in late medieval Greek. He shows that metaphrases may represent direct speech in a more vernacular way than other parts of the text and that these versions upgrade the linguistic renderings of nearly all grammatical domains. At the same time, he presents some evidence that these metaphrases distinguished only between literary and non-literary language as can be deduced from their linguistic terminology. He concludes his contribution by tentatively suggesting that common textual classifications for medieval Greek texts do not seem to be flexible enough to deal with such texts, a point that I would certainly subscribe to here.[2]
Chapters 6 and 7 both present results from new database projects that are underway, with a focus on derivational morphology and compounding respectively. Tina Lendari and Io Manolessou start by describing our knowledge gaps of derivational morphology in medieval and early modern Greek and outline the building blocks of their new project which seeks to fill this gap. The project is clearly built upon the foundation of the database compiled for the Cambridge Grammar of Medieval and Early Modern Greek (Holton et al. 2019), as they seek to expand its compilation of excerpts and digitized texts with more excerpts and newly digitized texts. A case study on the diminutive suffix -άκι(ον) and its corresponding masculine suffix (-άκιος/άκης) highlights how their collection of evidence flips existing chronologies, in particular that the masculine suffix was actually at the source of the development of the diminutive suffix instead of the other way around. Next, Angela Ralli and Georgios Chairetakis describe in detail how compounding works typologically and how it has worked in Cretan across the centuries. The data for their historical comparison is taken both from a database of compounding maintained at the University of Patras (DiComp) and a compilation of compounds for medieval and early modern Cretan. Their historical overview reveals, among other things, that (i) some types of compounding become more frequent relative to other periods of the history of Greek, (ii) left-headed compounding may be the result of contact with Romance in Crete, and (iii) the typologically surprising genesis of verb+verb based compounds that have now become common in Cretan. Many compounds also clearly have an evaluative component, but unfortunately less attention is paid to the semantics of these compounds.
In the last chapter in this volume, Christina Bassea-Bezantakou illustrates the complex task of the historical semanticist in dealing with the evidence from Greek, where one has to sift through the seeming continuity of attestation across the centuries and the impact of archaizing tendencies (especially from the 19th century). She discusses the relevant diachronic dimensions, such as etymological origin, relation to contemporary society, and semantic borrowings. Particularly insightful for the ‘dangers’ of conducting such research on Greek are cases that formally represent an older, pre-existing word, but semantically only have a borrowed sense, such as διαβατήριο as ‘passport’ and διαβατήρια έθιμα for ‘rite of passage’ from French.
To conclude, this volume delivers on its aims to fill in some gaps in our knowledge of the Greek language ‘after antiquity’. Its contributors do so by diving into understudied topics such as derivational morphology and compounding, re-evaluating crucial historical questions of dialect diversification and language contact with new frameworks, and, most of all, by capitalizing on new tools to reconstruct the development of the Greek language. Moreover, at many different points contributors manage to revise existing chronologies of grammatical phenomena, simply as a result of comparing and contrasting the different forms of evidence that are available to us now. This is a methodological result that is worth emphasizing for future scholarship. Inevitably, we could also point out some methodological limitations, such as the noticeable absence of the Encyclopedia of the Greek Language and Linguistics from the introduction, the lack of translations of the Greek in certain chapters and the inaccessibility of corpora/databases. The latter two unfortunately contribute to a lack of accessibility to the textual sources and linguistic evidence for other scholars, despite the clearly collaborative spirit of the volume. Even so, such observations should not detract from the many merits of the volume listed above.
References
Holton, David, Geoffrey C. Horrocks, Marjolijne Janssen, Tina Lendari, Io Manolessou, and Notis Toufexis. 2019. The Cambridge Grammar of Medieval and Early Modern Greek. Cambridge University Press.
la Roi, Ezra. 2025. “Sources and Methods for Detecting Language Change from Above and Below in Post-Classical Greek and Latin.” Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 11 (1): 173–201. https://doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2024-0008.
Authors and titles
- Io Manolessou, The regional diversification of Greek AD
- Nikolaos Pantelidis, Investigating the diachronic phonology of Medieval and Modern Greek through graphemic evidence
- Theodore Markopoulos, Language contact in Late Medieval Greek: an under-estimated phenomenon?
- Tina Lendari, Philology and φιλολογία: linguistic variation in Medieval and Early Modern Greek from the viewpoint of textual scholarship
- Martin Hinterberger, Many linguistic ways to tell the same story: the four versions of the Life of Maximos the Hutburner
- Tina Lendari and Io Manolessou, Medieval and Early Modern Greek derivational morphology: the missing chapters
- Angela Ralli and Georgios Chairetakis, Compounding in Cretan across centuries
- Christina Bassea-Bezantakou, Issues in the historical semantic analysis of Modern Greek
Notes
[1] One of the exciting opportunities mentioned by Markopoulos himself concerns the person of Michael of Rhodes and his journal written in Venetian which is preserved to us and could offer us detailed insights into a member of the Greek-speaking population of Rhodes and L1 interference from Greek.
[2] In fact, similar reservations have been made for post-classical Greek texts where we also have evidence for multi-register texts and innovations that are spread across lower and higher registers in a connected way (see the discussion in la Roi 2025, 177–79, 184–85, 191–95).