Dr. Word Person

Oh wow! What a relief!

Please keep us updated on this baked potato bowl concept implementation.

Okay but then the Roombas' natural predators would be able to see and then eat them. What then, Andrea. What then.

*Bahnhof Wirtschaft Myers Söhne 1909.

Alt text for the previous, since adding real alt text crashes my phone: A German door that looks like it wandered out of a steampunk novel. It's painted orange and yellow, has a window that looks like a porthole and an elaborate sign in a fancy script that says Bahnhof W????? 1909.

I realize that I missed the boat on this due to time zones, but I wanted to make sure you woke up to this AMAZING DOOR.

(My current hobby is taking the train to all sorts of little nothing towns and wandering around looking for cool buildings while imagining I'm Rick Steeves.)

It's kind of a mess. Aeolic shares some characteristics with West Greek, and others with Arcado-Cypriot. Ditto Attic-Ionic-- some similarities with West Greek, some not. How the major dialect groups are related to each other is one of the other major points of contention in Greek dialect studies.

This was also very much my experience teaching ancient Greek-- the students had a lot of holes when it came to English grammar that I needed to fill.

Tho other:

Le dialecte grec ancien de Chypre Cypriote is an Ancient Greek dialect of the first millennium BC, closely related to Mycenean, which has come down to us as an Aegean syllabary. The renowned Indogermanic scholar Markus Egetmeyer (Sorb...

Both of the main references for Cypriot specifically are in French.

Stephen Colvin has a Greek dialect reader that's probably your most accessible option (not that much in the way of ancient Greek dialectology is particularly accessible-- it's a really niche field and you need to be able to read French and German to read the literature fully).

Linguistics: how the nominalizing the fuck.

In any case, that is your long and tangled thread through the Dorian invasion hypothesis up through the many different inventions of Greek writing. Hope you enjoyed it :) /end

The Cypriot Syllabary was deciphered fairly early, thanks to some nice bilingual inscriptions, and it was the phonetic values of similar-looking signs in the Cypriot Syllabary that provided one of the keys to the eventual decipherment of Linear B. 18/

Even when alphabetic writing was invented, the Cypriot Greeks kept right on using the Cypriot Syllabary to write their dialect (Hellenistic Greek, when it arrives, is written in the Greek alphabet.) This state of affairs persisted until the Greek dialects died out in the 3rd century BCE. 17/

Because...the indigenous people of Cyprus during this time had their own writing system (it's know as Cypro-Minoan, and is a cousin of Linear B through Linear A), and the Greeks arriving on Cyprus eventually adapted this writing system to write Greek. 16/

It's one of the larger outstanding issues in Greek Bronze Age studies.

But this Late Bronze Age migration to Cyprus did have one interesting side effect, which was that the Greek language probably did not lose writing completely during the Dark Ages, to reinvent it via the Phoenicians. 15/

Meanwhile the archaeologists point out the total lack of support from the material evidence. They do not like the idea, but they grudgingly go along with it while having to resort to handwavy explanations like, well maybe not all migrations leave behind physical evidence, etc. 14/

The problem, of course, is point (2), that there's no evidence for any sort of migration or change in material culture at this time, which leaves the linguists and archaeologists at something of an impasse. The linguists insist that the dialect distribution means things have to be this way. 13/

Anyway, as you can see, if you're a linguist, this explanation works out really well! 12/

...leaving Arcadia as something of a linguistic refugium. Meanwhile, we know from archaeological evidence that plenty of Mycenaeans were immigrating to Cyprus during this time, and these immigrants could have easily brought the Cypriot Greek to Cyprus. 11/

The solution universally adapted by linguists is to posit that during the Bronze Age, Mycenaean + proto-Arcadian + proto-Cypriot was spoken across the Peloponnese, and during the Bronze Age collapse, West Greek-speaking Greeks from the north migrated over the coastal areas of the Peloponnese... 10/

The distribution of Arcado-Cypriot during the historical period is also very squirrely. Only in the landlocked center of the Peloponnese...and Cyprus??? CYPRUS???

Cyprus how many hundreds of kilometers away?

How...did it get over *there*? 9/

Mycenaean, as written in Linear B, is clearly not the same as undifferentiated proto-Greek. It clearly belongs with Arcado-Cypriot.

But, we have a problem, because Mycenaean is represented in places where West Greek dialects were spoken in historical times (Argolid, Laconia, Messenia, Crete.) 8/

...West Greek (most of northern Greece, most of the Peloponnese, Crete, and a wide swath of Aegean islands over to Rhodes), and Arcado-Cypriot (exactly what it sounds like: Arcadia in the Peloponnese, and Cyprus). 7/

In brief, there are four major subgroups of Greek dialects: Attic-Ionic (this includes more or less every writer to come out of Athens, plus Herodotus and the largest part of the Homeric dialect hash), Aeolic (Boeotian, Thessalian, and Lesbian = Sappho and Alcaeus)... 6/

pristine Minoan paradise uncorrupted by Greeks). The decipherment of Linear B did not put an end to the Dorian invasion hypothesis, though! In fact, it helped fuel it further, and the reason comes down to dialectology. 5/

This is partly correct. (2) is certainly correct, and (1) is correct in as much as the decipherment of Linear B did put an end to speculation that Greeks only arrived in Greece at the end of the Bronze Age (there was quite a lot of pressure from Evans, Ventris and others towards the idea of a... 4/

(1) that the decipherment of Linear B proved the existence of the Greek language in Greece at this point, so there could have been no Greek invaders, and (2) that there is no archaeological evidence for invaders/migrations because of the strong continuity in material culture. 3/

About the Dorian invasion in Greece: You summarize the longstanding theory that a wave of invaders (Dorians) came through Greece at the end of the Bronze Age and wiped out the Mycenaean civilization, and that two lines of evidence overturned this theory... 2/