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Act of the Scribe: Interfaces between scribal work and language use - 06-07-08/04/2017, Athens (Gree



The project Act of the Scribe (Academy of Finland) organises a workshop for scholars discussing various aspects of scribal work and how these relate to language use and language change in Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Currently, we see a growing interest on scribal practices and their role in language change, and an on-going tradition of (socio)linguistic studies has been established in the field of Classical languages. However, some fields of study are still under-represented and hinder the ability to form a comprehensive general picture of the linguistic situation at hand; for example, studying the multilingual situation in especially Egypt from the Ptolemaic to the Byzantine times continues to be challenging due to a gap between the disciplines of Greek and Latin on the one hand, and Demotic and Coptic research on the other. One of the aims of this workshop is to promote dialogue between the various written languages in Antiquity to be able to enhance the picture of ancient scribal practices. The general focus of the workshop lies in studying the interface between scribal work, including its technical properties, and language use.


FECHA/DATE/DATA: 06-07-08/04/2017


ORGANIZADOR/ORGANIZER/ORGANIZZATORE: Martti Leiwo ; Sonja Dahlgren ; Hilla Halla-aho ; Marja Vierros

INFO: web - actofscribe-athens2017@helsinki.fi

INSCRIPCIÓN/REGISTRATION/REGISTRAZIONE: [deadline: 31/03/2017]

email to actofscribe-athens2017@helsinki.fi


PROGRAMA/PROGRAM/PROGRAMMA: [LINK]

Thursday April 6

13.30. Registration and coffee

14.00. Opening


Session I

14.30. Andreas Willi (Oxford): One man’s bad handwriting is another man’s Proto-Latin – or how to decode the carmen Arvale

15.00. Nicholas Zair (Cambridge): Old-fashioned spelling and sub-elite education in the Roman Empire

15.30. Timo Korkiakangas (Oslo): Spelling variation and scribes' command of documentary Latin: A computational approach

16.00. Coffee break (offered by the Act of Scribe -project)


Session II 16.30. Martti Leiwo (Helsinki): Twisted Greek: Letter writers from praesidia in the Eastern Desert of Egypt 17.00. Joanne Stolk (Ghent): Scribal corrections in Greek papyri from Egypt 17.30. Victoria B. Fendel (Oxford): Bilingual letter writers – the verbs γράφω, οἶδα and θαυμάζω in formulae, idioms and collocations

19.00. Drinks reception (offered by the Act of Scribe -project)



Friday April 7

Session III

9.30. Arianna Gullo (Durham): The Graeco-Roman graphic κοινή in late antiquity

10.00. Tommaso Mari (Bamberg): “It is impossible to report back the exact words”: Spoken language and the work of scribes in the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon

10.30. Anastasia Maravela (Oslo) & Nicola Reggiani (Parma): Medical scribes at work: Exploring linguistic variation in Greek medical papyri

11.00. Coffee break (offered by the Act of Scribe -project)


Session IV

11.30. Klaas Bentein (Ghent): Documentary papyri as "multimodal" texts: Aspects of variation in the Nepheros archive (III - IV AD)

12.00. Carla Bruno (Siena): Infinitives in Ptolemaic Greek papyri: Syntax and style

12.30. Marja Vierros (Helsinki): Applying modern authorship attribution methods to papyri and ostraca – preliminary remarks


13.00.-15.00. Lunch (own expense)


Session V

15.00. Jenny Cromwell (Copenhagen): Terminological and palaeographic innovations among scribes in the administration of early Islamic Egypt

15.30. Tonio Sebastian Richter (Berlin): "You know justice and law and the kind of writing of the notaries”. Rhetorical skills and scribal work in P.Col. inv. 600, Coptic transcript of an arbitration hearing

16.00. Sonja Dahlgren (Helsinki): The language use of the Narmouthis scribes: Foreign language perception and native language transfer


16.30. Coffee break (offered by the Act of Scribe -project)


Session VI

17.00. Ruth Duttenhöfer: Scribal practice in Ostraca from Elephantine

17.30. Elizabeth F. Buchanan (Findlay, Ohio): The Sub-archive of Pilates, favourite nomikos of Dioscorus of Aphrodito

18.00. Anna Arpaia (Florence): Public notaries and ἀγορανόμοι in Alexandria in the early decades of Roman Egypt: Notary and legal education 19.30. Conference dinner (offered by the Act of Scribe -project)




Saturday April 8

Session VII

9.00. MariaChiara Scappaticcio (Naples): Babrius rudi latinitate constitutus. A Latin translation of three Babrius’ fables from the late antique Eastern Roman Empire: Authors, scribes and ‘mistakes of mistakes’ in P. Amh. II 26

9.30. Elena Martin González: Latin Influence in the Greek Inscriptions of Roman Macedonia

10.00. Hilla Halla-aho (Helsinki): Scribes and language in Latin documentary texts from Egypt

10.30.Coffee break (offered by the Act of Scribe -project)


Session VIII

11.00. Anna Novokhatko (Freiburg): Scribal work in the 5th c. BCE Greek texts


11.30. Anna Judson (Cambridge): The scribes of Pylos: studying orthographic variation in a Mycenaean palace

12.00. Artemis Karnava (Berlin): Linguistic and scribal pluralism in Cyprus during the 1st mill. BC


12.30.-14.30. Lunch (own expense)


Session IX

14.30. Giuditta Mirizio (Bologna/Heidelberg): Copying and not re-copying: linguistic reflections of the active role of the writer in official communications of Ptolemaic Egypt

15.00. Mariarosaria Zinzi (Firenze): What women wrote. A sociolinguistic analysis of private letters of women in ancient Egypt

15.30.–16.00. Closing




Sunday April 9

9.00. Excursion to Mykene

Ca. 14.00 Lunch at Nauplio

Ca. 17.00 Back in Athens

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