Marja Vierros
Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Helsinki, PI of ERC Starting Grant project Digital Grammar of Greek Documentary Papyri (Grant Agreement No 758481) 2018–2023. Up-to-date info on publications and activities, see University of Helsinki Research Portal https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/marja-vierros. ORCID: 0000-0001-8531-7055. Not updating academia.edu regularly. Working with Ancient Greek and Latin languages and linguistic variation, language contact and bilingualism using mainly Greek papyrological sources.
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Books by Marja Vierros
In order to reach plausible explanations for those phenomena, a thorough research into the sociohistorical and linguistic context was needed before the linguistic analysis. The general linguistic landscape, the population pattern and the status and frequency of Greek literacy in Ptolemaic Egypt in general, and in Upper Egypt in particular, are presented. Through a detailed examination of the notaries themselves (their names, families and handwriting), it became evident that there were one to three persons at the notarial office writing under the signature of one notary. Often the documents under one notary's name were written in the same hand. We get, therefore, exceptionally close to studying idiolects in written material from antiquity.
The qualitative linguistic analysis revealed that the notaries made relatively few orthographic mistakes that reflect the ongoing phonological changes and they mastered the morphological forms. The problems arose at the syntactic level, for example, with the pattern of agreement between the noun groups or a noun with its modifiers. The significant structural differences between Greek and Egyptian can be behind the innovative strategies used by some of the notaries. Moreover, certain syntactic structures were clearly transferred from the notaries first language, Egyptian. This is obvious in the relative clause structure. Transfer can be found in other structures, as well, although, we must not forget the influence of parallel Greek structures. Sometimes these can act simultaneously.
The interesting linguistic strategies and transfer features come mostly from the hand of one notary, Hermias. Some other notaries show similar patterns, for example, Hermias' cousin, Ammonios. Hermias' texts reveal that he probably spoke Greek more than his predecessors. It is possible to conclude, then, that the notaries of the later generations were more fluently bilingual; their two languages were partly integrated in their minds as an interlanguage combining elements from both languages. The earlier notaries had the two languages functionally separated and they followed the standardized contract formulae more rigidly.
Papers by Marja Vierros
In order to reach plausible explanations for those phenomena, a thorough research into the sociohistorical and linguistic context was needed before the linguistic analysis. The general linguistic landscape, the population pattern and the status and frequency of Greek literacy in Ptolemaic Egypt in general, and in Upper Egypt in particular, are presented. Through a detailed examination of the notaries themselves (their names, families and handwriting), it became evident that there were one to three persons at the notarial office writing under the signature of one notary. Often the documents under one notary's name were written in the same hand. We get, therefore, exceptionally close to studying idiolects in written material from antiquity.
The qualitative linguistic analysis revealed that the notaries made relatively few orthographic mistakes that reflect the ongoing phonological changes and they mastered the morphological forms. The problems arose at the syntactic level, for example, with the pattern of agreement between the noun groups or a noun with its modifiers. The significant structural differences between Greek and Egyptian can be behind the innovative strategies used by some of the notaries. Moreover, certain syntactic structures were clearly transferred from the notaries first language, Egyptian. This is obvious in the relative clause structure. Transfer can be found in other structures, as well, although, we must not forget the influence of parallel Greek structures. Sometimes these can act simultaneously.
The interesting linguistic strategies and transfer features come mostly from the hand of one notary, Hermias. Some other notaries show similar patterns, for example, Hermias' cousin, Ammonios. Hermias' texts reveal that he probably spoke Greek more than his predecessors. It is possible to conclude, then, that the notaries of the later generations were more fluently bilingual; their two languages were partly integrated in their minds as an interlanguage combining elements from both languages. The earlier notaries had the two languages functionally separated and they followed the standardized contract formulae more rigidly.
points of view over the previous decades. Four duplicates and some single copies of contracts have been preserved in the Pathyris archives, but they have not previously been studied from the point of view of copying practices. Therefore, a closer examination focusing on this aspect is warranted. This article is an addition to the — still rather thin — general discussion on copying practices in the documentary papyri from Egypt.
Abstract: An archive of over a hundred Greek texts (petitions, letters, accounts, and dreams) from the Serapeion in Memphis provide us with an exceptional possibility to examine the language variety of two brothers, Ptolemaios and Apollonios, the eldest and the youngest son of the soldier-settler Glaukias. The handwritings of both brothers were identified by U. Wilcken (1927) when he published these texts from the mid-2nd century BCE as one entity. The questions I am addressing in this paper, are the following: 1) Can we say that these autograph texts represent the idiolects of Apollonios and Ptolemaios? 2) How does that reflect in our interpretation of the interesting linguistic variation found in the whole archive (described in Bentein 2015)? If a text has been written by the hand of certain individual, does it necessarily follow that the language variation pattern belongs to this individual? The text types coming from the pens of Apollonios and Ptolemaios vary, but Apollonios produced more texts. For example, Ptolemaios did not write any petitions. The petitions written by Apollonios, on the other hand, are especially interesting since they are usually drafts or copies. In some cases it is very difficult to distinguish between a copy and a draft. The archive includes also several petitions written by chancery hands, showing that scribes were used in the process of producing the petitions sent to the King or a lower official. Therefore, it is worth studying in detail what kind of patterns we can discern in Apollonios’ draft petitions vs. the final petitions and compare them with his letters and accounts. I will pay attention to the patterns of legal / official language and examine if they are transferred into Apollonios’ ”idiolect”. The texts written by Ptolemaios form another point of comparison. The papyrus archive of Ptolemaios and Apollonios partakes in the discussion concerning the level of the individual vs. the speech community in studying language variation grammar (cf. Labov 2001, 33–34).
New digital platform ”Sematia” enables preprocessing the Greek papyri, stored in DDbDP, so that the papyri can be linguistically annotated (e.g. according to the guidelines of Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank). Preprocessing is executed in two layers which take into account a) what is preserved and was originally written in the papyrus b) the regularizations and restorations made by the editors. Annotating both layers for morphology and syntax provides us with novel ways of querying the language of the papyri. Moreover, we gather new metadata concerning the writers in the Sematia database. This will help studying the acts of writing and their relation to certain writers or authors and their linguistic fingerprint. I will present the workflow of Sematia (http://sematia.hum.helsinki.fi/) combining the presentation with a preliminary case study on the bilingual archive of the Memphis Serapeion. The texts by the katochoi in the Serapeion are interesting as regards their language and the fact that Wilcken, who published the texts collectively in UPZ I, identified the handwritings of the protagonists.