Doric Greek


Doric or Dorian, also known as West Greek, was a group of Ancient Greek dialects; its varieties are divided into the Doric proper and Northwest Doric subgroups. Doric was spoken in a vast area, including northern Greece, most of the Peloponnese, the Southern Aegean, as well as the colonies of some of those regions in Cyrene, Magna Graecia, the Black Sea, the Ionian Sea and the Adriatic Sea. It was also spoken in the Greek sanctuaries of Dodona, Delphi, and Olympia, as well as at the four Panhellenic festivals; the Isthmian, Nemean, Pythian, and Olympic Games.
By Hellenistic times, under the Achaean League, an Achaean Doric koine appeared, exhibiting many peculiarities common to all Doric dialects, which delayed the spread of the Attic-based Koine Greek to the Peloponnese until the 2nd century BC. The only living descendant of Doric is the Tsakonian language which is still spoken in Greece today; though critically endangered, with only a few hundred – mostly elderly – fluent speakers left.
It is widely accepted that Doric originated in the mountains of Epirus in northwestern Greece, the original seat of the Dorians. It then expanded to all other regions and the colonisations that followed. The presence of a Doric state in central Greece, north of the Gulf of Corinth, led to the theory that Doric had originated in northwest Greece or maybe beyond in the Balkans. The dialect's distribution towards the north extends to the Megarian colony of Byzantium and the Corinthian colonies of Potidaea, Epidamnos, Apollonia and Ambracia; there, it further added words to what would become the Albanian language, probably via traders from a now-extinct "Adriatic Illyrian" intermediary. In the north, local epigraphical evidence includes the decrees of the Epirote League, the Pella curse tablet, three additional lesser known Macedonian inscriptions, numerous inscriptions from a number of Greek colonies. Furthermore, there is an abundance of place names used to examine features of the northern Doric dialects. Southern dialects, in addition to numerous inscriptions, coins, and names, have also provided much more literary evidence through authors such as Alcman, Pindar, and Archimedes of Syracuse, among others, all of whom wrote in Doric. There are also ancient dictionaries that have survived; notably the one by Hesychius of Alexandria, whose work preserved many dialectal words from throughout the Greek-speaking world.

Varieties

Doric proper

Where the Doric dialect group fits in the overall classification of ancient Greek dialects depends to some extent on the classification. Several views are stated under Greek dialects. The prevalent theme of most views listed there is that Doric is a subgroup of West Greek. Some use the terms Northern Greek or Northwest Greek instead. The geographic distinction is only verbal and ostensibly is misnamed: all of Doric was spoken south of "Southern Greek" or "Southeastern Greek."
Be that as it may, "Northern Greek" is based on a presumption that Dorians came from the north and on the fact that Doric is closely related to Northwest Greek. When the distinction began is not known. All the "northerners" might have spoken one dialect at the time of the Dorian invasion; certainly, Doric could only have further differentiated into its classical dialects when the Dorians were in place in the south. Thus West Greek is the most accurate name for the classical dialects.
Tsakonian, a descendant of Laconian Doric, is still spoken on the southern Argolid coast of the Peloponnese, in the modern prefectures of Arcadia and Laconia. Today it is a source of considerable interest to linguists, and an endangered dialect.

Laconian

Laconian was spoken by the population of Laconia in the southern Peloponnese and also by its colonies, Taras and Herakleia in Magna Graecia. Sparta was the seat of ancient Laconia.
Laconian is attested in inscriptions on pottery and stone from the seventh century BC. A dedication to Helen dates from the second quarter of the seventh century. Taras was founded in 706 and its founders must already have spoken Laconic.
Many documents from the state of Sparta survive, whose citizens called themselves Lacedaemonians after the name of the valley in which they lived. Homer calls it "hollow Lacedaemon", though he refers to a pre-Dorian period. The seventh century Spartan poet Alcman used a dialect that some consider to be predominantly Laconian. Philoxenus of Alexandria wrote a treatise On the Laconian dialect.

Argolic

Argolic was spoken in the thickly settled northeast Peloponnese at, for example, Argos, Mycenae, Hermione, Troezen, Epidaurus, and as close to Athens as the island of Aegina. As Mycenaean Greek had been spoken in this dialect region in the Bronze Age, it is clear that the Dorians overran it but were unable to take Attica. The Dorians went on from Argos to Crete and Rhodes.
Ample inscriptional material of a legal, political and religious content exists from at least the sixth century BC.

Corinthian

Corinthian was spoken first in the isthmus region between the Peloponnesus and mainland Greece; that is, the Isthmus of Corinth. The cities and states of the Corinthian dialect region were Corinth, Sicyon, Archaies Kleones, Phlius, the colonies of Corinth in western Greece: Corcyra, Leucas, Anactorium, Ambracia and others, the colonies in and around Italy: Syracuse, Sicily and Ancona, and the colonies of Corcyra: Dyrrachium, and Apollonia. The earliest inscriptions at Corinth date from the early sixth century BC. They use a Corinthian epichoric alphabet.
Corinth contradicts the prejudice that Dorians were rustic militarists, as some consider the speakers of Laconian to be. Positioned on an international trade route, Corinth played a leading part in the re-civilizing of Greece after the centuries of disorder and isolation following the collapse of Mycenaean Greece.

Northwest Doric

The Northwest Doric or Northwest Greek group is closely related to Doric proper. Whether it is to be considered a part of the southern Doric Group or the latter a part of it or the two considered subgroups of West Greek, the dialects and their grouping remain the same. West Thessalian and Boeotian had come under a strong Northwest Doric influence.
While Northwest Doric is generally seen as a dialectal group, dissenting views exist, such as that of Méndez-Dosuna, who argues that Northwest Doric is not a proper dialectal group but rather merely a case of areal dialectal convergence. Throughout the Northwest Doric area, most internal differences did not hinder mutual understanding, though Filos, citing Bubenik, notes that there were certain cases where a bit of accommodation may have been necessary.
The earliest epigraphic texts for Northwest Doric date to the 6th–5th century BC. These are thought to provide evidence for Northwest Doric features, especially the phonology and morphophonology, but most of the features thus attributed to Northwest Doric are not exclusive to it. The Northwest Doric dialects differ from the main Doric Group dialects in the below features:
  1. Dative plural of the third declension in -οις : Ἀκαρνάνοις ἱππέοις Akarnanois hippeois for Ἀκαρνᾶσιν ἱππεῦσιν Akarnasin hippeusin.
  2. ἐν + accusative : en Naupakton.
  3. -στ for -σθ : γενέσται genestai for genesthai, μίστωμα mistôma for misthôma.
  4. ar for er: amara /Dor. amera/Att. hêmera, Elean wargon for Doric wergon and Attic ergon
  5. Dative singular in -oi instead of -ôi: τοῖ Ἀσκλαπιοῖ, Doric τῷ Ἀσκλαπιῷ, Attic Ἀσκληπιῷ
  6. Middle participle in -eimenos instead of -oumenos
Four or five dialects of Northwestern Doric are recognised.

Phocian

This dialect was spoken in Phocis and in its main settlement of Delphi, where a local form known as the Delphian dialect was spoken. Plutarch says that Delphians pronounce b in the place of p.

Locrian

is attested in two locations:
The dialect of Elis is considered, after Aeolic Greek, one of the most difficult for the modern reader of epigraphic texts.

Aetolian

The dialect of ancient Aetolia.

Acarnanian

The dialect of ancient Acarnania.

Epirote

Spoken at the Dodona oracle, firstly under control of the Thesprotians; later organized in the Epirote League under the control of Molossians.

Ancient Macedonian

Most scholars maintain that ancient Macedonian was a Greek dialect, probably of the Northwestern Doric group in particular. Olivier Masson, in his article for The Oxford Classical Dictionary, talks of "two schools of thought": one rejecting "the Greek affiliation of Macedonian" and preferring "to treat it as an Indo-European language of the Balkans" of contested affiliation ; the other favouring "a purely Greek nature of Macedonian as a northern Greek dialect" with numerous adherents from the 19th century and on.
Masson himself argues with the largely Greek character of the Macedonian onomastics and sees Macedonian as "a Greek dialect, characterised by its marginal position and by local pronunciations" and probably most closely related to the dialects of the Greek North-West. Brian D. Joseph acknowledges the closeness of Macedonian to Greek, but retains that "he slender evidence is open to different interpretations, so that no definitive answer is really possible". Johannes Engels has pointed to the Pella curse tablet, written in Doric Greek: "This has been judged to be the most important ancient testimony to substantiate that Macedonian was a north-western Greek and mainly a Doric dialect". Georgios Giannakis supports the view that recent scholarship has established the position of ancient Macedonian within the dialect map of North-West Greek. There has been some recent scholarly agreement, often expressed as cautious or tentative, that ancient Macedonian belongs to the Northwest Greek group.
Miltiades Hatzopoulos has suggested that the Ancient Macedonian dialect of the 4th century BC, as attested in the Pella curse tablet, was a sort of Macedonian 'koine' resulting from the encounter of the idiom of the 'Aeolic'-speaking populations around Mount Olympus and the Pierian Mountains with the Northwest Greek-speaking Argead Macedonians hailing from Argos Orestikon, who founded the kingdom of Lower Macedonia. However, according to Hatzopoulos, B. Helly expanded and improved his own earlier suggestion and presented the hypothesis of a 'Achaean' substratum extending as far north as the head of the Thermaic Gulf, which had a continuous relation, in prehistoric times both in Thessaly and Macedonia, with the Northwest Greek-speaking populations living on the other side of the Pindus mountain range, and contacts became cohabitation when the Argead Macedonians completed their wandering from Orestis to Lower Macedonia in the 7th c. BC. According to this hypothesis, Hatzopoulos concludes that the Ancient Macedonian Greek dialect of the historical period, which is attested in inscriptions such as the Pella curse tablet, is a sort of koine resulting from the interaction and the influences of various elements, the most important of which are the North-Achaean substratum, the Northwest Greek dialect of the Argead Macedonians, and the Thracian and Phrygian adstrata. Angelos Boufalis suggests that "several features can be established as local and most of them seem indeed to be shared with the NW Doric and/or the Thessalian dialect"; but also that "rather than a monolithic dialect throughout, different local or regional idioms may have had been spoken in this extensive geographical area".
In the region of Upper Macedonia, the tribes of Elimiotes, Orestes, Lyncestae, and Pelagones, were all Epirotic tribes and used the Northwest Greek dialect.