Talk:Late Greek

Merge?

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

To not merge (for now) given a lack of consensus with discussion stale for almost a year. Klbrain (talk) 14:05, 21 August 2021 (UTC)

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What is the source for the periodization "Late Greek"? Horrocks, in his standard history of Greek, doesn't use it, and neither does Browning in his Medieval and Modern Greek.

The descriptive adjective "late" is very rarely applied to the language, and usually is applied to "late Greek art", "late Greek philosophy", "late Greek writers", etc. There are a very few cases I have found it being used: Veitch, 1871, Higgins, 1945, Anlauf, 1960, Lee 1980, but that's it.

The only extended discussion I can find of this category is in Higgins, where he defines "Standard Late Greek" as distinguished from the Koine (being more Atticising) and "standard" in the sense that it is fairly uniform. It is essentially an Atticizing register of Koine characterized in particular by the use of modals in hypotheticals, quite different from what this article uses as a definition.

The crucial point is that other scholars do not seem to have taken up his terminology, regardless of what is recorded in tertiary sources like dictionaries.

In any case, I think it would make sense to merge this in to one of our existing articles, e.g., Byzantine literature (or maybe something else...). --Macrakis (talk) 14:22, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

I agree, though I'd prefer a merge into Koine Greek, of which this is basically just a subtype. Since this article doesn't really provide any concrete information about linguistic forms and how this form differs from others, it really doesn't make much sense to have it as a standalone article (especially now that somebody has added it to the list of period terms in the hatnote of Greek language itself). Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:51, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Merging to Koine Greek is an option, too. It's a bit tricky to classify, given the (eternal) diglossia in Greek, and the variety of registers or literary styles (e.g., Second Sophistic).

In the meantime, I think it's safe to remove it from the hatnote since, as you say, this article is fairly content-free, and it is not a standard period. --Macrakis (talk) 16:49, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

For the record, one reason it's clearly not caught on is probably that it's so inconsistent with naming practices elsewhere. "Late" always refers to the last stage of something before it ceases to exist. But Greek clearly didn't cease to exist. Terminologically, it just makes no sense to have both a "Late X" and a "Modern X", where "modern" comes after "late". For the literary and cultural traditions of ancient Greece one might be able to justify such a terminology, but as a linguistic periodization term it's quite blatantly a misnomer. Fut.Perf. ☼ 19:52, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

The parallel is presumably with Late Latin, which is Classical Latin as used in Late Antiquity, as opposed to the organic development of Latin into Romance. And we all know that for classical scholars, Modern Greek is outside their field of view. :-(. I will go ahead and remove the hatnote for now. --Macrakis (talk) 20:33, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

• Firm oppose Even if no scholars had taken up the terminology, the number of scholarly works mentioned by Macrakis should be plenty to form the basis of a standalone article. Late Latin and Late Greek are of equal merit on their own, their archaizing features nonwithstanding. I also count Whatmough 1944, Pattenden 1983, Maconi 1985, Vian 2008, Morlet 2008, Vessella 2011, Cameron 2016, and Krausmuller 2020 as among the literature. Moreover, the Webster's II New College Dictionary (3rd ed.) not only defines "Late Greek" as "Greek as used from the 4th to the 9th century" but also gives its etymologies for other words with reference to "LGk" etymons. Other works to mention "Late Greek" in passing include Beekes 1969 and Łajtar 2003. Merging with Byzantine literature is inappropriate. Byzantium did not have a monopoly on Late Greek and the Greek of the Middle Ages is not the same as the Greek of Late Antiquity. GPinkerton (talk) 21:40, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

@GPinkerton and Future Perfect at Sunrise: thanks for the information! I seem to have spoken too soon! Some questions for you:

Which Krausmuller 2020? He is very prolific.... The article entitled "A Conceptualist Turn: The Ontological Status of Created Species in Late Greek Patristic Theology", if that's the one you're referring to, talks of "Late Greek Patristic Theology", which I interpret as meaning Greek Theology in the Late Patristic period, not Patristic Theology written in Late Greek. And in fact the body of the article doesn't even use the phrase "Late Greek"; it talks about the "Late Patristic" period. But perhaps I missed something in another article of his?

I don't have access to Cameron's 2016 "Palladas: New Poems, New Date?/Wandering Poets and Other Essays on Late Greek Literature and Philosophy", but that appears to be about Greek Literature which is Late, not Literature written in Late Greek. But as I say, I haven't seen it.

Vessella 2011 does in fact seem to be about the Late Greek language, though he never defines it precisely. I am not a specialist, but if I understand him correctly, he is talking about the prescriptive pronunciation of Attic recommended in late lexica.

Morlet 2008 seems to be about late Greek philosophy, not language.

I don't have access to Vian 2008, but it seems to be about themes and motifs in literature, not language.

Maconi 1985 is about late Greek logic, not a Late Greek language.

Is it the case that Webster's Late Greek is the same thing?

I do wonder why Horrocks does not use the term. He talks of Atticism and Atticized Greek, but I don't believe he ever mentions "Late Greek" (it doesn't appear in the index).

In any case, since you seem to know the literature, it would be wonderful if you would fill out this article so that it is correct and has some substance. The current text makes it sound as though it is strictly a chronological division of Greek, but both Vessella and Higgins define it as an archaizing register which existed in parallel with the spoken language. I even wonder if V and H are talking about the same thing, since V focuses on lexica and H focuses on use of the moods. --Macrakis (talk) 22:30, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

Here's the thing: there is a blurry line in the sources between "Greek which is late" and "Greek which is Late by virtue of it being of Late Antiquity". I would argue that the latter is what is the subject here. So Late Greek Patristic Theology, Late Greek Literature, Late Greek Philosophy, Late Greek Logic, on the strength of being written in Greek "Late" in Antiquity, are all characterized as "Late Greek". The fact that it's different from contemporary spoken Greek is all the more reason to have a separate article, the literary (but also epigraphic) language having drifted from the koine. I can't say I know the literature, but I'm certain it deserves a better treatment that the redirect this article once was (to "Medieval" Greek, of all things). It's surely worth having something dealing with the Greek literature of Late Antiquity as separate from the Greek of the Middle Ages, the second millennium, the Middle Byzantine period, the Late Byzantine period, or however one wants to periodize. GPinkerton (talk) 22:58, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

I don't understand what you're saying. First you define it as a chronological period, "the Greek of Late Antiquity", but then you seem to agree with Higgins or Vessella that it is an Atticising register in parallel with other registers of both spoken and written Greek. Higgins talks about syntax; Vessella only talks about pronunciation as reflected in prescriptive lexica, so it's not even clear to me that they're talking about the same corpus.

That said, even if we manage to clear up what exactly the topic is, and come up with a widely-accepted meaning for "Late Greek", it isn't necessarily the case that it needs its own article. --Macrakis (talk) 23:09, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

It's both. A literary and prescriptive register and a chronological period during which that tradition flourished. GPinkerton (talk) 02:09, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

But that's still not a linguistic periodization then. A chronological period during which a literary tradition flourished is not the same thing as a period of a language. You might occasionally get authors talking about "Renaissance English poetry", and some of them might even talk about specific linguistic choices characteristic of the style of that poetry, but that doesn't mean "Renaissance English" is a valid period term for the description of the English language. It's still just part of "Early Modern English". Just as the language written by those "Late Greek" authors is still part of Koine. To have a basis for an article that poses as a period article in the series of linguistic articles about subdivisions of Greek, we'd first of all need some actual linguistic content (currently we have precisely zero content beyond the dicdef), and we'd need the terminology sourced to the only type of authors that matters here: linguists. We won't find such treatments, because from the linguistic perspective it's just such an obvious, absurd misnomer. Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:11, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

So, at the moment, there's nothing in our Koine Greek article that suggests Koine was current or spoken beyond c. 300 AD. The entry under "Greek language" in the Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity has some indications of how the Greek in this period is different from the Greek of Classical Antiquity.

Greek changed more slowly than Latin. In Late Antiquity, Greek remained, as at the beginning of its history, a language based on a rich system of inflections (variable endings on words), and remains so even today. Nevertheless, it can be inferred that several profound and widespread changes occurred in Greek between the Classical period and Late Antiquity.
Furthermore, in the East Roman world (and even after the fall of Constantinople) there was sustained inter-ethnic contact and bilingualism, which resulted in the development of shared features among the languages of the wider Balkans, in Greek and, to a variable extent, Bulgarian, Romanian/Aroumanian, Serbian, Albanian, Turkish, and Romany.
However, the educated classes (to which many extant Greek authors belonged) in their writing shunned the spoken Greek of their time. The written language in the Late Antique period displays a range of archaizing styles, mostly reproducing strict Attic or literary Koiné, less commonly using an approximation to contemporary speech with added features from the formal language.
As a result, although we have texts from all periods of the history of Greek, the Greek of Late Antiquity is not fully documented. While untutored spoken Greek became increasingly different from Classical Greek, the written language mostly imitated Attic and styles of Koiné. Exceptions before the 11th century were few and somewhat partial, in that they did not accept all features of contemporary Greek. Such texts include the Chronicle of John Malalas (6th cent.), or the De Administrando Imperio by Constantine Porphyrogenitus (10th cent.). From the 12th century, compositions arguably close to vernacular Greek (mostly poetry, based on oral traditions) became more common, but their vocabulary and morphology present a remarkable multiplicity of forms, and we cannot tell whether the older forms they contain were still used in speech. Classical orthography was generally retained, despite significant shifts in pronunciation.
Greek grammar
Between the Classical and the Late Antique periods, spoken Greek underwent profound changes. Some had started very early, especially in Ionic Greek.
Long /e/ (spelt ei) moved towards the sound /i/; by the 1st century bc, /ai/ became /æ/; by the Roman imperial age, diphthongs consisting of long vowels +/i/ lost the /i/, while vowel length distinction faded, and the pitch accent of Ancient Greek became a stress accent. The open sound of the letter η‎ eventually merged with /i/, and the second element in the diphthongs /au/ and /eu/ came to be pronounced as /v/ or /f/. Aspirated plosives and, by the 4th century ad, voiced plosives became fricatives: /p^h/>/f/; /t^h/>/θ‎/; /k^h/>/x/; /b/>/v/; /d/>/ð‎/; /g/>/γ‎/. Initial /h/ faded, and initial unstressed vowels were frequently elided.
The old conjugation of -mi verbs was increasingly replaced by the -ō type; the perfect and the aorist tense merged, the former being discarded; the optative mood, the future tense, the dual number, and the dative case became obsolete; the second aorist tense forms were replaced with those of the first; the morphologically distinct middle voice of verbs also fell into disuse. Many nouns with unusual declensions were replaced entirely or declined according to more common declensions. The infinitive mostly gave way to finite constructions, and the largely free word order was replaced by Verb-Subject-Object or Subject-Verb-Object. New words, including many adopted from Latin, appeared.

Whatmough 1944 also treats of grammatical differences between Late Greek and other forms. Cameron 1970 also deals with "late Greek poetry" and cites Barnes 1967 as speaking of "late Greek occasional poetry". Where is the evidence that these "late Greek" genres are Koine? The authorities generally refer to Koine as a thing apart. GPinkerton (talk) 13:43, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

We have articles on both Late Latin and Vulgar Latin, even though they were contemporary. I don't see what the problem is with having an equivalent for Greek. GPinkerton (talk) 13:52, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I agree that Koine may be the wrong thing to merge with. Perhaps it should be Atticism or better Atticizing Greek, following John A.L. Lee's "The Atticist Grammarians" [1]. If we believe that Lee, Higgins, and Vessella are talking about the same thing, and if we base our definition on them, we come up with an article along the following lines, which should be merged with the existing Atticism article:

Atticizing Greek is a highly Atticising register of Greek used from the 1st to 8th centuries CE and characterized by conscious imitation of aspects of Ancient Greek phonology and heavy use of modal constructions.

Notable authors include ...

It emerged from the Second Sophistic...

This makes it a register of Greek during a certain period, not a periodization. GP says "Even if no scholars had taken up the terminology, the number of scholarly works mentioned by Macrakis should be plenty to form the basis of a standalone article." That's not the way WP is supposed to work. We're supposed to find the best sources and use the most common name for things. Our sources agree that there is an Atticizing register of Greek in this period. Search tools make it easy to find sources which use the term "Late Greek", but that may not be the most widely used term. As for the English dictionaries, those are very weak sources, partly because they're tertiary, partly because they only give sketchy definitions of the terms. What is the full reference for your Whatmough 1944? I find "Up from Gilgal" and "ΚΕΛΤΙΚΑ...dialects of ancient Gaul", but those don't seem relevant. As for the argument by parallelism with Late Latin, we're not supposed to make up our own terminology if we can avoid it.... --Macrakis (talk) 14:16, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

I would disagree with a merge there too. Atticism is only one of the features of Greek in this period, there are other important aspects too. There are plenty of Latinisms too, and archaizations of foreign words, and that sort of thing. Whatmough is a review of another more full work on the optative in Late Antiquity; both use the term "late Greek". The New Testament language to which Lee refers is not the same thing as the meaning of "late Greek", and their respective use of Atticisms does not make them the same.

• Whatmough, J. (1944). "Review of The Late Greek Optative and Its Use in the Writings of". Classical Philology. 39 (3): 200–201. ISSN 0009-837X.
• Henry, Sister Rose de Lima (1943). The Late Greek Optative and Its Use in the Writings of Gregory Nazianzen. Catholic University of America Press.

In any case, we're not making up vocabulary, it's been around for decades. GPinkerton (talk) 14:40, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

There's no Attic word for stirrup, for example, but there is one in Late Greek, for obvious reasons. GPinkerton (talk) 14:42, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

I understand that this variety of Greek has many characteristics beside Atticisms (we've already established that it uses the optative in a distinctly non-Attic way). The question is whether Late Greek is in the usual term (not just "a" term) used for it in the literature.

The Lee paper is not about New Testament language. It was published in a volume entitled The Language of the New Testament: Context, History and Development, and is presumably about "Context, History and Development".

Interestingly, both Whatmough's review and de Lima Henry's paper itself (as quoted in another review, JSTOR 704980) talk of "late Greek" with a small "l", using the term descriptively. --Macrakis (talk) 17:33, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

PS "Atticizing" is not a synonym for "Attic". It clearly isn't Attic, despite its pretentions. --Macrakis (talk) 17:56, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

I don't think capitalization is important, and articles have to begin with capital letters. A similar situation exists with "Late Antiquity" which is indifferently capitalized at whim, leading to the awkward article name Late antiquity. Surely we have now established that whatever these authors are speaking of, it is something distinct from the Koine (koine?) of the Hellenistic and early (Early?) Imperial periods and distinct from medieval (Medieval? cf. Middle Ages) Greek of the second millennium, and is distinct from the mere practice of Atticization. What more is needed to be distinct enough to have its own Wikipedia page? What other name could we redirect to? John A. L. Lee's 1980 paper on the subject of "late Greek" also refers to "a change from Koine to Atticistic" but also to "the threshold of late Greek" (as in the title). He also has an article from 2010 distinguishing Basil the Great's Greek with New Testament Greek, referring to Basil's language (as distinct from, though contemporary with) Koine. He refers to it as "Atticistic", but quotes another authority as referring to "late Greek literature". Our own article Byzantine literature mentions Atticistic, but links to Atticism, which is brief but encompasses the phenomenon well before the Greek writers of Late Antiquity and isn't ideal as a link to a whole swathe of centuries' worth of literary effort. GPinkerton (talk) 18:19, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Was I really that unclear? I certainly wasn't suggesting that we should have an article entitled late Greek with a small "l". I was pointing out that the authors you mention as authorities for a period called Late Greek refer to "late Greek", which with a small "l" is descriptive, not a name.

Yes, we have established that Atticizing Greek is distinct from ordinary Koine.

I agree that the current article on Atticism is insufficient.

I'll stop now. I think I've made my arguments. Now we need to get some more perspectives on this. --Macrakis (talk) 18:41, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

No, the use of capital letters elsewhere is what is unimportant. You seem to be suggesting that because "late Greek" often has a small "l" it must not be a valid name for the subject. But "Atticizing Greek" is also just a description. It only has a capital letter because Attica is a proper noun. "Atticistic" is the same. They're just adjectives - "Greek that is uses Atticism". I don't see any greater validity to using either of those over "late Greek", especially as all the sources referred to above chose to refer to "late Greek ...x" rather than "Atticizing Greek" or "Atticistic Greek". GPinkerton (talk) 18:50, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

I agree that we can't tell from the capitalization of "Atticizing Greek" whether it is a name or a description. But we can tell that "late Greek" is a description. --Macrakis (talk) 19:27, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

I disagree. Can we tell from "late antiquity" that it is just descriptive of the quality of oldness that is in someway late? GPinkerton (talk) 21:40, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Take a look at the following ngrams graphs:

Late/late Antiquity [2]

Late/late Latin [3]

Late/late Greek [4]

Late Greek is far less common than late Greek, while in the other cases Late is considerably more common.

Late Antiquity started rising in popularity after Peter Brown popularized the term in 1971.

Ngrams data is always tricky to interpret, but it looks to me as though Late Greek never caught on as a name.

I happened across a catalog record which may help us think about all this: Gerhard Anlauf, Standard late Greek oder Attizismus?. Unfortunately, I can't use the library for now (COVID) and anyway my German isn't very good.... Perhaps someone else has seen it? I wonder if it's useful? --Macrakis (talk) 22:12, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

I have asked for input from the Linguistics and the Classical Greece and Rome Wikiprojects. Maybe they can help us out. --Macrakis (talk) 17:08, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.