23 April 2023

New book: The Aeolic Dialects of Ancient Greek

Front page of the book. Deep blue back ground with a papyrus fragment of Sappho for decoration
Book cover

The Aeolic Dialects of Ancient Greek A Study in Historical Dialectology and Linguistic Classification by Matthew Scarborough has been published as volume 26 of Brill's Studies in Indo-European Languages & Linguistics.

You can see more about how to get your hands on the book on the Brill homepage: https://brill.com/display/title/57781

Here's a little teaser for it:

The Aeolic dialects of Ancient Greek (Lesbian, Thessalian, and Boeotian) are characterised by a small bundle of commonly shared innovations, yet at the same time they exhibit remarkable linguistic diversity. While traditionally classified together in modern scholarship since the nineteenth century, in recent decades doubt has been cast on whether they form a coherent dialectal subgroup of Ancient Greek. In this monograph Matthew Scarborough outlines the history of problem of Aeolic classification from antiquity to the present day, collects and analyses the primary evidence for the linguistic innovations that unite and divide the group, and contributes an innovative new statistical methodology for evaluating highly contested genetic subgroupings in dialectology, ultimately arguing in support of the traditional classification.

Matthew has also spread the ἔπος on Twitter:

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