The Postclassical Greek: the Intersections of Philology and Linguistics - 15-16-17/02/2016, Mainz (G

Greek is one of the few languages in the world with an uninterrupted literary tradition. Nearly all the periods of Greek are well-documented by large amounts of texts. While the pre-classical and classical periods have been receiving much scholarly attention for centuries (for a synoptic overview see Giannakis, ed. and 2014; Bakker, ed., 2010), the study of post-classical Greek, from New Testament Greek until the Byzantine period, is a much recent phenomenon, albeit with a large body of research (cf., inter alia, Browning 1983; Horrocks 2010; Bentein 2014; Gianollo 2010; and Janse 1993). This interdisciplinary workshop aims at bringing together scholars working on different aspects of post-classical Greek up to the Byzantine period. We strongly believe that only integration of the linguistic and philological knowledge can create a coherent model of the processes that underlay the language change of that period and provide answers as to why Greek of the Byzantine period is the way it is. We aim at highlighting language changes /sensu latissimo/ of that period from different perspectives. The topics we would like to address are among the following (but are not restricted to them):

- Language standardization phenomena, penetration of the colloquial elements of the period into written texts; the effects of the tradition, as, for example, scribes’ mistakes; what can be gained or lost from studying the manuscripts directly? - Parameters and metrics for distinguishing between normalized texts and texts with a stronger penetration of colloquial elements of contemporary Greek; influence of Classical and Biblical Greek; - Principles that underlie the written tradition; text copying (such as, e.g., amendments/corrections by copyists); - The role of Byzantium in the preservation of Classical texts: How much intervention on the part of the Byzantine scribes/excerptors/compilers is there to expect? How do the changes to the Classical texts made in the Byzantine period can be traced and how do they influence our understanding of the Classical period? (cf. Kaldellis 2012) - The social, historical and cultural environment that potentially may have constrained the language of that period; influence of other languages and the way the interaction with other languages was organized; - The sociolinguistic situation: different registers/lects, diatopic and diastratic variation; multilingualism; - Effects of the historical-critical editing (as, for example, normalization or emendations): To what extent do they mirror the linguistic “reality”? Are these effects rather insignificant or do they have a potential to influence our understanding of the language? - Is the chronological division of the language tradition into Classical, Byzantine and Modern, which influenced the study of Greek since the Renaissance times, justified? - Methods and metrics for dating texts on the basis of linguistic phenomena; - Purely linguistic approaches to language change such as grammaticalization, language contact, structural and functional explanations, etc.; emergence of new grammatical categories; disappearance of grammatical categories; - How Digital Humanities may contribute to the questions addressed in the workshop? Which corpora do we have? What kind of data, tools and methods are available? - Corpus-based approaches to the study of Greek.

FECHA/DATE/DATA: 15-16-17/02/2016

LUGAR/LOCATION/LUOGO: Fakultätssaal des Philosophicums, Johannes-Gutenberg-University of Mainz (Mainz, Germany)

ORGANIZADOR/ORGANIZER/ORGANIZZATORE: Dariya Rafiyenko (University of Leipzig) ; Ilja A. Seržant (University of Mainz)

INFO: web - dariya.rafiyenko@uni-leipzig.de ; ilja.serzants@uni-mainz.de

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