General information
Greek Linguistics: An introduction to the historical linguistics of Ancient and Medieval Greek (December 9-10, 2024)
The course aims to introduce students to key research questions in Greek linguistics, with a focus on historical, comparative, and sociolinguistic aspects. The classes offer a good balance between theoretical approaches (key theories are presented, and major publications are discussed) and hands-on practice through guided exercises. This structure ensures that students, regardless of their prior knowledge of Greek, can engage with and benefit from the lessons. Practical examples and exercises are designed to accommodate different levels of proficiency in Greek, offering tailored support to meet varying student needs.
Students will be required to read an article and complete an exercise (approximately 1 hour) in preparation for each of the five lessons.
Programme
The programme can be downloaded here: Programme
Lecturers
dr. Ezra la Roi: The Historical Pragmatics of Ancient Greek
In this session, we will discuss how we can trace changes in communication practices from the Classical into the Post-Classical Greek period (V BCE – VI CE) by using methods from historical pragmatics. After introducing the different types of sources that we have at our disposal, we are going to analyze the histories of several pragmatic patterns together. In doing so, we discuss how factors of form, function, and context interact with each other in shaping specific pragmatic patterns of greeting, wishing, and asking.
dr. Chiara Monaco: When Variationist Linguistics Meets Metalanguage: Sociolinguistic Snapshots from Postclassical Greek
This session will focus on an analysis of metalanguage as an important analytic category for various sociolinguistic phenomena such as: (1) The social evaluation of language; (2) Metalanguage for ideological construction; (3) Strategic stylization in discourse. The aim of the session is to provide insights from ancient and modern metalinguistic sources and analyse how they contribute to our knowledge of the Greek language.
dr. Dalia Prattali Maffei: Greek Dialects in the Archaic and Classical Ages: Sociolinguistic Approaches
Ancient Greek dialects do not only attest regional variation, but they were also employed in different contexts and with different purposes. This lecture explores dialect usage from a sociolinguistic perspective, in particular dialect variation in relation to registers, literary genres, and styles, and how usages changed diachronically. Two case-studies will be tackled in-depth, with close text reading: the development of epigram as literary genre, from inscriptions to books; and dialect variation in daily speech through Aristophane’s comedy.
dr. David Pérez Moro: A Diachronic Approach to High-Register Greek: the Process of Rewriting Homer’s Iliad
The complex situation of the Greek language, along with various cultural, social, and historical changes, led to the development of tools designed to aid in the correct understanding of texts, such as scholia, lexica, commentaries, and summaries, among others. In this season, we will first focus on the problems faced by metaphrasts in understanding Homer’s Iliad when rewriting it, and second, we will examine the linguistic features of these rewritings from morphological, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic perspectives. The lecture will conclude with a case-study: a linguistic analysis of Manuel Moschopoulos’ metaphrase.
MA Michele Didoli & prof. Andrea Cuomo: Language, Narration, Imagery: a Linguistic Approach to Intralingual Greek Translations in Early Modern Times
The 16th and 17th century are generally acknowledged as the blossoming period of Vernacular Greek production. Alongsinde texts composed ex novo in this register, we find some interesting examples of translations from more archaizing Greek varieties. Such intralingual translations offer unique insights into the interaction between different registers and open the path for further considerations on style, imagery and narrative technique. Our session will provide lively examples from the 17th-century prose version of the heroic-narrative Byzantine poem Digenis Akritis. We will reconstruct the intralingual translation process and, in this light, some linguistic peculiarities of the resulting text will be explained. We will then approach from a linguistic point of view the changes in narration and imagery derived from transposing a poem into a prose text.
Registration
To participate, students can register with Prof. Dr Klaas Bentein (klaas.bentein@ugent.be) or Prof. Dr Andrea Cuomo (andrea.cuomo@ugent.be). Please include in your email a short motivation, including your background, research interests and why you would like to follow this course.
Students can register until October 31 at the latest.
Practical information
The course will take place at the Faculty of Arts & Philosophy (Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent), on December 9-10, 2024.
This course is organized in collaboration with OIKOS. There is limited sponsoring available for travel & accomodation for OIKOS students.
The course is free of charge for everyone.