HELLENISTIC GREEK.
Hellenistic Greek Defined (§ 1). Constituents of Hellenistic Greek (§ 2). Vernacular Basis of Hellenistic Greek (§ 3). Unity of Hellenistic Greek (§ 4). Pronunciation and Inflection (§ 5). Lexicography (§ 6). Syntax (§ 7). The Greek Bible not Literary Greek (§ 8).
The definition given in a former edition of this
work of Hellenistic Greek as " the prevailing
designation of that mode of speech in
i. Hellen- use among those Jews who lived among
istic Greek the Greeks, or that peculiar form of the
Defined. Greek language which it took in the thought and mouth of the Semitic Orient when the two spheres of life began to act upon each other," is not only " narrow and historically insufficient " but no longer historically possible. Knowledge of this idiom is no longer gained chiefly from Jewish works, there being now accessible a rich fund of sources in inscriptions and papyri from many lands, and it is of such a character that it bespeaks the interest not only of the philologist, but of him who is engaged in the study of culture and of religious history. Hellenistic Greek can no longer be isolated as a " sacred tongue " or as "Biblical Greek," conceptions mediated on the one side by religious dogmatics, and on the other side by a dogmatic philology, the latter of which played with the catchwords " classical Greek " and " vulgar " or " common Greek," and so prevented the perception of the historical fact of the spread of a language to wider usage and of its consequent development. For an impartial method of viewing the subject from a historical-linguistic point of view Hellenistic Greek must be defined as the worldspeech of the times of the Diadochoi and the emperors. If all Greek is divided into " ancient," " middle and late," and " new " Greek, Hellenistic Greek is in general identical with " middle and late " Greek, used between 300 B.C. and 600 a.d.; i.e., it begins with Alexander's conquests and closes with the establishment of a national Greek State, the
Hellenistic Greek
THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
Byzantine empire. Various designations have been used for the language thus defined: Hellenistic Greek, Greek world-speech, middle or late Greek, and koine (" common "). The most used is the last, koine, employed alone as a noun, though with no general agreement as to its exact meaning. Some understood by it postclassic literature with the exception of Atticizing works (so Winer- Schmiedel). Hatzidakis meant by it the whole development of common Greek, oral and written, between the limits assigned above, 300 b.c-600 a.d. With this Schweizer practically agrees, excluding only the Atticizing works. The varying usage to which the term koine has been subjected makes it advisable to retain the term Hellenistic Greek for the language as defined above.
In historical investigations of the language two tendencies are observable. One emphasizes the Attic as the real basis of Hellenistic Greek, the other minimizes its influence. This is due to the fact that investigators have laid stress upon only one of two sets of sources; they have looked exclusively either upon books, such as the works of Polybius, or have directed their attention to inscriptions and papyri alone and have forgotten or not recognized that these were two sides of a common possession. It is to be observed with Schweizer and with Kretschmer (Wochenschrift fiir klassische Philologie, xvi., 1899, cols. 2 sqq.) that a difference exists in any language between the spoken and the written language, between literature and conversation. 2. Constitu- The former is bound by law, is polished ents of and regulated; the latter is a thing of Hellenistic wild and untrammeled growth, yield- Greek, ing to the call of the moment's emergency. But neither is to be separated from the other as if they were separate entities. If literature alone is observed, a greater or less degree of Attic influence might be seen, more or less influence of the vernacular also detected. Many of these works bear almost no trace of Attic flavor, but are marked by expressions, turns of thought, and a vocabulary strange to classical Attic. Such results produced a reaction and a conscious attempt to approach the classic standard, the first example of which is Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the contemporary of Augustus. As a consequence, even in the literature which most closely approaches this standard, much is at once discernible as imitation or mere ornament. Discerning inquiry will strip this off as a mask and leave open to the sight the kernel, the origins and the peculiarities of the new worldspeech as it appears in the inscriptions and ostraca and papyri of the times, which stream in numbers from Greece, Egypt, and Nubia, and are so rich as to promise a renaissance of Greek philology. Auxiliary to this mass of new material is the literature of the Greek of the Old and the New Testament, the Apocrypha, and the Pseudepigrapha, the legends and books of martyrs, correspondence of various sorts, and particularly the material in the works of the grammarians and lexicographers, including matter which the schoolmasters would have ruled out from the language, but which existed in the vernacular. This contains Attic elements with much that is so un- Attic that it can not be
called either Attic or perverted Attic. Of such a character is the reduction in pronunciation of diphthongs to single vowels, which continues to this day, and is registered also in the inscriptions of the Egyptian Greek, going back to a Beotian dialect. Other changes register Ionic or Eolian influence upon the vowels of the whole language. The consonants also underwent change. By sibilation tt became ss, aspiration was dropped and added (kuthra for chutra), while Doric influences were also felt. Thus a new speech was made out of diverse elements, just as the New High German has come into being from Upper, Middle, and Low German elements. As elements of the varied Greek-speaking peoples gathered in Egypt and the Orient, they welded the varieties of their mother tongue into a common vernacular, based indeed on Attic, but embracing the other constituents.
Along with these changes it is obvious that with
the spread of the language into new parts of the
world a mass of words would come
3. Vernac- in from the Egyptian, Persian, and
ular Semitic tongues — names for animals,
Basis of plants, and the commodities of public
Hellenistic and private life. Political conditions Greek. brought about a blending of local peculiarities of dialect in the common lingua franca, since neither Attic nor Doric nor Ionic were the norms of language in the new domain. Desire for learning this new speech which was on its way to become the bond of a new world-citizenship promoted its growth. And doubtless much that comes out as new in literature was really far older, having happened to come to light for the first time in the new documents. The old hypothesis that in the new tongue the Macedonian and Alexandrian dialect were predominant can no longer be held, if by " Macedonian " be meant the language of Macedonia. That the vocabulary of Alexandria was influential in the Hellenistic world by reason of the centrality of Alexandria is of course correct. But the character of this new tongue is due to the welding in common intercourse of elements, especially but not exclusively Attic and Ionic, into a new and living vernacular, which in turn became a vehicle of literature. Hellenistic vernacular is not the vulgarizing of a literary language; the literary language is the ennobling of the vernacular.
It seemed quite natural to differentiate Hellenistic Greek according to local peculiarities, as when h. Dieterich divided it into that of Egypt, Asia Minor. and Greece. The old notion of an Alexandrian " dialect " as a separate philological quantity had a long-lived popularity and a certain specious basis, since most of the writers of note of the period were of Egypt. Naturally the peculiarities they showed were called " Egyptian " Greek. Warning must, however, be uttered against the conception that the local differences in the lingua franca hardened into " dialects." While there were local differences, they were not significant; the common speech was one, and Schmid rightly speaks of the " wonderful completeness " of this common tongue, and of the unity which pervaded its phonetic and morphological changes. So that the phrases " Jewish Greek " Christian Greek," and the like are " fanciful