Palmer L.R. The Greek Language
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unaffected by the possibility that they all have a common etymological origin. It has been suggested that all forms
go back to adverbial forms of the demonstrative pronoun ke-, with Ablaut alternation ken/kn *. The latter would
have developed before consonant and vowel respectively to
/ . In the combination false division
resulted in the A-I
, while in Arcadian the original form is visible in . The status of Mycenaean (eke)-qe is
disputed. But if this is also a potential particle, then overall unity can be established only by postulating *qwe(n)*,
with a post-Mycenaean development of ouqwe(n)* to ouke(n). The particle qwen* might be an adverbial form of
the indefinite pronoun with the meaning 'at some time, ever, etc.' The full grade is mirrored in Skt. -cana (ná ékas
cana 'not anyone') 1 and in the Germanic
, e.g. OE 'somewhere', OHG iowergin 'somewhere', cf. Gmc
irgend. The -hun appended in Gothic to indefinite pronouns or adverbs (ni ains-hun, ni has-hun 'no one') is
traceable to the zero grade *qwn*.
If this etymology holds for the Greek potential particle, then Doric ka goes back to a separate adverbial form
*qwa*. Whether from this or from *ka, this form of the particle sets West Greek apart from the other Greek
dialects, just as
is an unmistakable feature of Attic-Ionic.
2. The second isogloss arises out of the treatment of the sonant liquids and . Many of the examples are from
literary and grammatical sources or culled from proper names in the epigraphic sources. Among the words
concerned are
(for ) (for < *mrghu-* and (for < dhrsu-*). Further,
Cypriot has the aorist
( < *wrg-* and the glosses (= < *krd*)-
(< *trqwj-*, and perhaps (Arc. ). Homer adds the presumably
Aeolic aorist (< *amrt-*, and ( < *n-mrto-*).
Ingenious attempts have been recently made to dispose of these examples by ad hoc hypotheses, but they remain
curiously concentrated in the sphere of A-C and Aeolic, a distribution which has been given new point by the
Linear B evidence (see above), to which we must now add the name tosita =
1 It is of interest that in Latin after a negative the indefinite pronoun also has an appended adverbial form
of the same stem, quisquam. the full meaning of which would have been '(not) anyone anyhow'.
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(with zero grade *dhrs- *- as opposed to full grade *dhers- in Thersites).
3. The pronoun
occurs in Thessalian and Cypriot and possibly also in Linear B.
4. The athematic conjugation of contracted verbs.
5. Vocabulary items like
in Thess., Arc., Cypr., and Linear B (it has been plausibly argued that also
once had a similar distribution); ( = ), Thess. and Cypr.; Thess., Lesb., Arc. and Linear B (this
is not due to a change of o > u).
The Linear B evidence has confirmed and increased the earlier conclusions about the affinity of Thessaly and
Boeotia with the Mycenaean Peloponnese. For instance, qwetro* (qetoropopi) finds its counterpart in E. Thess.
. The dual of a-stems in -o has its parallel only in Hesiod's , while the infinitive terejae echoes
the Lesbian type
. If qeromeno is taken more plausibly as gwelomenoi* 'willing', this form of the verb again
links up with Boeotian
and Thessalian rather than A-C . The fact that Lesb. has
with the same vowel as A-C but the typical Aeolian gemination (as in Thess.), suggests a complex dialect
patterning of *gwel(s)-* , gwol(s)-* in Mycenaean Greece.
Again, suza = sukiai 'fig-trees' finds an echo in Lesb.
(contrast A-I / ).' Another vocabulary item
has an interesting distribution: the word for 'willow' is
in most Greek dialects. But Mycenaean has erika =
helikas 'of willow', and is ascribed to Arc. by Theophrastus while is the name of an Arcadian town.
The mountain name attests the one-time presence of the word in Boeotia while is a town in Achaea,
the name of which is testimony to a pre-Dorian 'Achaean' population.
An example of decisive importance is unfortunately doubtful and disputed. It concerns the morphological pair
toe/tome that occur in the Pylian land texts. However, if methodological considerations give second place to
'solutions' which simply dismiss toe as a scribal error and grant preference to the proposal which accounts for both
forms, then the interpretation
(subj.) 'is to pay' and (inf.) 'must pay' provides us with a criterion which
links Linear B with Boeot.-Thess. and separates it from A-C (infin. in
).
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Finally, there is evidence that before the coming of the Dorians, Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot formed a geographical
continuum, with Aeolian stretching into the territory of Corinth and Argos. Both these dialects show examples of
the typically Aeolic dative plurals in
, while the Argive pronoun recurs in the literary Lesbian of
Sappho and Alcaeus. Dorian operations against an Aeolic Corinth are attested by Thucydides (IV. 42. 2) (
).
To conclude, the constellation of cross-connections seems strong enough to support the long proposed setting-up of
a major unit embracing A-C and Aeol. It has been called variously 'Central Greek' or 'Achaean', with subdivisions
'North Achaean' = Aeolic and 'South Achaean' = Arcado-Cypriot.
A more recent suggestion, which has enjoyed considerable vogue, makes a north-south division in the Greek
dialects and links 1, Aeolic with West Greek and 2, Arcado-Cypriot with Attic-Ionic. This involves the re-drawing
of what has always been regarded as a major isogloss in Greek dialectology: the assibilation of
> ( /
), which was basic to the old division between West and East Greek. It is, of course, true that is found in
Boeotian and Thessalian (as opposed to Lesbian
), but this has been explained as one of the many West Greek
intrusions into these dialects (see further below,
pp. 72-3). That there was a movement of 'Doric' speakers from the north-west into ' Achaean' territory is evident
from the dialect map (Fig. 4). Of the occupation of the Peloponnese and the isolation of Arcadian we have already
spoken. In Thessaly the concentration of West Greek elements diminishes from west to east, so that scholars have
set up two divisions: 1, Thessaliotis in the south-west, 2, Pelasgiotis in the north-east. Important isoglosses
separating the two are (a) -o/-oi as genitive singular of o-stems and (b)
/ as the infinitive of thematic stems.
Typical West Greek elements of Thessalian are 1,
, 2, aorists of verbs with original dental stem, 3,
for .
Boeotian is still more heavily contaminated since, in addition to the above, it has 4, the article / for / , 5,
for / , 6, for . Common to Thessalian (Pelasgiotis and Boeotian) are the thematic infinitives
of the type
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(see above). There is thus no difficulty in ranging the non-assibilation of
among the West Greek intrusions into
the Mainland Aeolic dialects, for
is in any case to be so classified. Those who would rearrange the isogloss
explain away Lesbian
as an Ionic borrowing; this done, they posit as a feature of the proto-Aeolic regions
from which Lesbos was colonized. Since Linear B has overwhelmingly
(see above), the assibilation is regarded
as a major north-south division. However, we have seen that there are signs that even in Linear B the assibilation
was comparatively recent, and so slight a phonological change must be weighed against the complex cross-
relations discussed above. In any case, if
in Thessalian and Boeotian is a proto-Aeolic feature, this does not
constitute a link with West Greek, for it is a generally accepted principle in the calculus of dialect relations that the
retention of archaisms has little or no significance. The preservation of
is precisely such a non-change. For the
pre-Dorian innovations of proto-Aeolic, see below.
Considerable difficulties also arise in coupling Attic-Ionic with Arcado-Cypriot and deriving both from a
hypothetical 'South Greek'. Certainly they share the important isogloss
characterizing the athematic infinitive.
But Linear B shows that in the development of
their paths had already divided: or/at, ra. Cypr. again is a
major isogloss separating A-C from A-I with its striking innovation (on Arc. see above). The A-I fronting
of a (pp. 62 f.) is also an early phenomenon, as was shown by the development of *naswos to
, for this
involves 1, change to nawos, 2, loss of digamma, 3, a >
, 4, quantitative metathesis > eo. Even the Homeric
poems exhibit the last stage in the development of ao with synizesis: , etc. This shows incidentally how
early in A-I the loss of intervocalic digamma was. Against this the proponents of the new theory have urged a low
date for the change a >
by adducing the example of Ionic < Pers. . Mada- since this ethnic name would
not have become known to them until their settlement in Asia Minor. But the argument is fallacious: if the Ionians
had already changed a to fronted
, then they would have substituted this for the foreign a. Such sound substitution
is a commonplace phenomenon of 'languages in contact'.
All the indications are that A-I was a separate dialect already
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in the Mycenaean age: there is no linguistic road leading from torpeza to
. Again, A-I is distinct from
A-C
(also Linear B) as A-I is from A-C . The latter pair involves two points of difference: the basic
element of
is different from that of . Each of these elements may be extended by the endings -s or -ti so
that the Greek dialect map offers us four different words for 'towards':
: . The primary. division
is into
and regions, and from this point of view A-I and A-C belong to different linguistic worlds. The
geographical patterning is also an obstacle in linking A-I with A-C to the exclusion of Aeolic. We mentioned
above the distinctively Aeolic datives in
as substratum elements in the Doric dialects of Corinth and Argos.
These forms are especially important: since they are innovations and indicate not only that Aeolic was a distinct
dialect in the Bronze Age but also that it extended into the Peloponnese, where it presumably linked up with the
Arcado-Cypriot group.1
We now pass to the still more formidable obstacles in the way of positing a North Greek dialect group comprising
West Greek and Proto-Aeolic. To make this even plausible we require a constellation of shared innovations not
found in other dialects. It has just been pointed out that retained
cannot be accepted as such evidence. On the
contrary, the featural constellations of West Greek and Proto-Aeolic are remarkably different. The latter presents
such striking innovations as the third declension dative plural in
and the perfect participle in / . To
this we may add another point of verbal morphologythe extension of the athematic infinitive
to thematic verbs
( , etc.) which, as we saw, is common to Thess. and Boeot. and is also Homeric. Significant is also the
occurrence of forms like
in Cretan Doric, where they must be ascribed to the Achaean substratum. The
conclusion imposes itself that the thematic infinitives in
are yet another feature that must be ascribed to the
pre-Doric Peloponnese. But Homer also uses athematic infinitives in
, which is the Lesbian form. The
explanation is that Proto-Greek had a number of competing
1 We quote the verdict passed by Householder and Nagy (1972), 62: ' ... there are strong arguments in favor
of positing the penetration, in the Late Mycenaean era, of Aeolic or North-Mycenaean elements into such
South Mycenaean dialectal areas as the Peloponnese'.
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infinitives from which the dialects selected (selection being also an 'innovation', like that between
and ).
We conclude that Proto-Aeolic possessed two athematic infinitive forms
and ; that the extension of the
former to thematic verbs (an important innovation) was ancient is shown by the agreement of Homer and the two
mainland dialects of Aeolic. The gulf between this group and West Greek is high-lighted by the contrast of
Thessaliotis
with Pelasgiotis , paralleled by the dative plurals and , the latter being, as we saw,
another characteristic innovation of Aeolic (see further below). We may add yet another to the Aeolic elements in
the Peloponnese. This is the Homeric masculine form
'one', which recurs also in the Doric of Messenia and
Crete.
To turn now to West Greek: what is notable about this dialect group is the rich set of features which mark it off
from all other groups, yet with a distribution over the whole territory from north-west Greece to Crete and Rhodes
that reveals their pre-migration date. For methodological reasons we mention first the 'selection' of
as the
ending of the first person plural active of the verb. Again, the futures in
are another striking example which
can hardly be discounted as 'surely a recent innovation'. On the contrary, they must find their place in the dialect
patterning now enriched by the Linear B futures ewepsesomena and aseso(n) si (p. 50).
That Proto-West-Greek, characterized by these exclusive innovations, must be pushed back some considerable
time before the 'Dorian' migrations is indicated by its dialectal split. For the NWG dialects also are distinguished
by a remarkable innovationthe third declension dative plural in
, , etc.). What is of special interest
is that these datives, common to all the dialects of this sub-group, appear to have been ancient in the NWG
heartland (Aetolia and West Locris) but were introduced relatively late (possibly as a consequence of the Aetolian
League, fourth century B.C.) to the eastern Locrians and Phocaeans (Delphi), where they replace the earlier
type of the 'Achaean' substratum.
A similar picture appears in Elis, where we find a kind of bridge-dialect between NWG and Doric. Elis was
divided into three cantons 1, Elis, 2, Pisatis and the Alpheus and 3, Triphylia in the south. '[he occupation seems to
have been least effective
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in the last: according to Strabo, VIII. 333 Triphylia was originally inhabited by Arcadians, who still claimed it as
their territory in the fourth century B.C. While the regular NWG datives in
appear, there is an example of
. This important isogloss, third declension , and the dialect stratification, imply that the so-
called 'Dorian' migrations involved West Greek tribes speaking dialects which, though closely related, were clearly
differentiated into two main branches. One of these had already introduced striking innovations into the Proto-
West-Greek which their unmistakable common physiognomy compels us to postulate. How implausible and
remote from the observed facts the postulated 'North Mycenaean' is emerges from the genealogical tree of Fig. 5,
which is discussed below, pp. 99 ff.
In conclusion, it may be said that neither the new material provided by the decipherment of Linear B, nor the
recent reassessment of the dialect material have, in our opinion, seriously shaken the long-established picture of
Greek dialect relations. So far from there being an impressive constellation of shared innovations between West
Greek and Proto-Aeolic, there is a deep gulf between the two groups which goes back to the Late Bronze Age.1
On the other hand, the shared features of Arcado-Cypriot and Aeolic have, if anything, been increased, and the
geographical continuum of their respective territories has been reinforced by the distribution of the
datives as
substratum elements in the West Greek dialects to the north of the Corinthian gulf and in the Peloponnese.2 There
is thus a strong case for the old view, now regaining support, that the four major groups had already evolved
considerably before the great Dorian migrations. Their geographical siting may be schematically represented as in
Fig. 3.
It now remains to attempt an historical interpretation. The self-evident event that emerges from the comparison of
Fig. 3 and Fig. 4, particularly from the parallel west-east bands
1This is also the view expressed by Householder and Nagy (1972), 61: 'The most plausible conclusion,
then, is that the prehistoric phases of Arcado-Cypriot, Aeolic, and Attic-Ionic were already differentiated in
the late Bronze Age...'
2An evident substratum element in Laconian is the divine name (cf. Arc. , by vowel
assimilation <
).
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Fig. 3.
The Distribution of the Greek Dialects c. 1300 B.C.
spanning the Aegean in the latter, is in the first place the colonization of the littoral of Asia Minor and the
intervening islands by Aeolic and Ionic settlers, with a corresponding' South Achaean' settlement of Cyprus. All
this accords with the traditions handed down in Greek as folk-memory. This is also true of the events which caused
the major change in the dialect pattern: there can be no serious doubt about the reality of the 'Dorian' migrations. A
point of interest emerges from the distribution of the Dorian colonies in the islands and the littoral of Asia Minor.
They form a wedge between Cyprus and Ionia and it is evident that when the overseas thrust took place, the central
and northern Aegean were barred to the Dorians by strongly-held Ionic and Aeolic settlements. This is particularly
clear with Ionic which occupies the whole of Euboea, and the
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Fig. 4.
The Distribution of the Greek Dialects in the Alphabetic Period
greater part of the Cyclades, only Melos, Thera, Carpathos, Cos and Rhodes falling to the Dorians.
A 'Dorian' migration is the only way of accounting for the distribution and stratification of the West Greek dialects.
North-west Greeks moved along the north side of the Gulf of Corinth and also into the north-west Peloponnese,
while Dorians took possession of the rest of the Peloponnese (excepting the fastness of Arcadia) and subsequently
moved to Crete, Carpathos and Rhodes. This conclusion is in full accord with the traditions of Greek folk-memory.
N.G.L. Hammond1
1History of Greece to 322 B.C., 79.
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observes: 'The distribution of these dialects conforms with that of the invading peoples, as portrayed in the literary
tradition. The pattern of Doric coincides precisely with the traditions of Dorian settlement. The pattern of north-
west Greek enlarges on the meagre traditions which survive of the other invading peoples. It indicates that the
Thessaloi, the Boeotoi, and the followers of Oxylus [the leader of the Aetolians who occupied ''hollow'' Elis] spoke
the same dialect and therefore flowed from a common source into south-west Thessaly, Boeotia, and Elis. This
common source can hardly have lain elsewhere than in southern Epirus.' As for the Dorians, with their closely-
related dialect, this 'is explicable only on the hypothesis that before the time of the invasions the speakers of the
two dialects lived in contiguous areas. These areas were probably West Macedonia and Epirus. For, according to
the literary tradition, the Dorians were situated first in south-west Macedonia and then in Doris, and the Thessaloi
came from Thesprotia in Epirus.'
Yet there is nothing in the archaeological record which matches the striking uniformity of the West Greek
settlement. This has led some archaeologists to deny the reality of the 'Dorian invasion', but this is a dispute about
a word. It may well be that the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization was the work of other forces and that the
Dorian expansion was a later step-by-step infiltration, extending perhaps over a century or so. This would fully
accord, as we saw, with the archaeological and linguistic evidence for the continuation, at a much lower cultural
and economic level, of the 'Achaean' occupation of the Peloponnese. But the indubitable fact which we have to
interpret is the change in the dialect pattern, reinforced by sociological facts, such as the tribal organization into
Hylleis, Dymanes and Pamphyloi.
The disparity between the linguistic and archaeological evidence is particularly clear in Crete. Here I follow in the
main the account of Vincent Desborough.1 After the mainland disasters of. c 1200 B.C. Crete appears to have
received an access of Mycenaean refugees signalized by the sudden appearance of locally-made Mycenaean III C
pottery, particularly noticeable at Knossos and Phaestos. These followed a brief period of revival in the Central
Aegean characterized by the Central
1The Greek Dark Ages, London (Benn, 1972), especially 112-29, 221-39.
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