HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

The dialects of the first millennium BC

The ancient Greeks themselves traced their ethnic and linguistic heritage to Hellen, the eponym of both Greece (Hellas, Ἕλλάς) and the Greeks (Hellenes, Ἕλληνες). Hellen was said to be a son of Deucalion, a son of Prometheus and survivor of the great primeval flood of Greek tradition. The self-recognized diversity of Greek culture and language was attributed to descent from Hellen's three sons, Dorus, Xanthus, and Aeolus, being the alleged progenitors of the Dorian, Ionian, and Aeolian Greeks respectively.

Modern scholars recognize a dialectal distinction which fundamentally parallels this ancient tripartite division. Prior to Michael Ventris' decipherment of the Linear B tablets of the Mycenaean Greeks (see §2.1) in 1952 (see Ventris and Chadwick 1973:3–27), the ancient Greek dialects (i.e., of the first millennium BC) were broadly separated into (i) Attic-Ionic; (ii) Arcado-Cypriot; (iii) Aeolic; (iv) Doric; and (v) Northwest Greek. Each of these, in turn, shows some lesser or greater degree of internal differentiation.

Attic-Ionic

Attic is the dialect of Athens and the surrounding region of Attica (and is the focus of the linguistic description presented in Ch. 2). Its closely related sister dialect of Ionic is divided into three subdivisions, East, Central, and West Ionic.