Koine Greek: Encyclopedia II - Koine Greek - Sources of Koine

Koine Greek - Sources of Koine

The first scholars who studied Koine, both in Alexandrian and contemporary times, were classicists whose prototype had been the literary Attic language of the Classic period, and would frown upon on any other kind of Hellenic speech. Koine Greek was therefore considered a decayed form of Greek that was not worthy of attention. The reconsideration on the historical and linguistic importance of Koine Greek began only in the early 19th century, where renowned scholars conducted series of studies on the evolution of Koine throughout the entire Hellenistic and Roman period that it covered. The sources used on the studies of Koine have been numerous and of unequal reliability. The most significant ones, are the inscriptions of the Post-Classic periods and the papyri, for being two kinds of texts that have authentic content and can be studied directly. Other significant sources are the biblical texts of the Old and the New Testaments, the former being translated and the latter being written directly in Greek. The teaching of the Testaments was aimed at the most common people, and for that reason they're using the most popular language of the era. Information can also be drained from some Atticist scholars of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, who, in order to fight the evolution of the language, published works which compared the supposedly "correct" Attic against the "wrong" Koine by citing examples. For example Phrynichus Arabius during the 2nd century AD wrote:

• Βασίλισσα οὐδείς τῶν Ἀρχαίων εἶπεν, ἀλλὰ βασίλεια ἢ βασιλίς.
  • "Basilissa (Queen), none of the Ancients said, but Basileia or Basilis".

• Διωρία ἑσχάτως ἀδόκιμον, ἀντ' αυτοῦ δὲ προθεσμίαν ἐρεῖς.
  • "Dioria (deadline), badly illiteral, instead use Prothesmia".

• Πάντοτε μὴ λέγε, ἀλλὰ ἑκάστοτε καὶ διὰ παντός.
  • "Pantote (always) do not say, but Ekastote and Dia pantos".

Other sources can be based on random findings such as inscriptions on vases written by popular painters, mistakes made by Atticists due to their imperfect knowledge of pure Attic, or even some surviving Greco-Latin glossaries of the Roman period, e.g:

• "Καλήμερον, ἦλθες; - Bono die, venisti?" (Good day, you came?).

• "Ἐὰν θέλεις, ἐλθὲ μεθ' ἡμῶν. - Si vis, veni mecum." (If you want, come with me).

• "Ποῦ; - Ubi?" (Where?).

• "Πρὸς φίλον ἡμέτερον Λεύκιον. - Ad amicum nostrum Lucium." (To our friend Lucius).

• "Τί γὰρ ἔχει; - Quid enim habet?" (What does he have?—What is it with him?).

• "Ἀρρωστεῖ. - Aegrotat." (He's sick).

Finally, a very important source of information on the ancient Koine Greek is the Modern Greek language with all its dialects and its Koine form and idioms, which have preserved most of the ancient language's oral linguistic details that the written tradition has lost. For example the Pontic and Kappadocian dialects preserved the ancient pronunciation of η as ε (νύφε, συνέλικος, τίμεσον, πεγάδι etc), while the Tsakonic preserved the long α instead of η (ἁμέρα, ἀστραπά, λίμνα, χοά etc) and the other local characteristics of Laconic. Idioms from the Southern part of the Greek-speaking regions (Dodecanese, Cyprus etc), preserve the pronunciation of the double similar consonants (ἄλ-λος, Ἑλ-λάδα, θάλασ-σα), while others pronounce in many words υ as ου or preserve ancient double forms (κρόμμυον - κρεμ-μυον, ράξ - ρώξ etc). Linguistic phenomena like the above imply that those characteristics survived within Koine, which in turn had countless idiomatic variations in the Greek-speaking world.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Sources of Koine", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki