Spelling variation in Greek letters from Oxyrhynchus, 50-350 AD

Thesis

Postclassical Greek is well-attested. Over 4.5 million words survive in over 80,000 published Greek papyri, making papyrus (=reed) texts valuable for studying language variation and change. Because papyri survive direct, that variation includes variation in spelling.

Past work has used this to reconstruct sound change. But focusing exclusively on phonological reconstruction misses sociolinguistic information conveyed by spelling, and ignores that spelling variation has non-phonological as well as phonological drivers. Phonological approaches can run into uncertainty because of long-term contact between Greek and Egyptian between c. 300 BC–800 AD. Unexamined assumptions about linguistic normativity also mean spelling is overemphasised when evaluating contact phenomena.

This thesis therefore focuses on non-phonological motives influencing spelling variation. It adopts a dual-route model of spelling and adapts methods from corpus linguistics, especially of historical English, to quantify and describe spelling patterns in a coherent dataset of 771 papyrus letters from Oxyrhynchus dated between 50–350 AD. An emergent, evaluation-free approach allows the thesis to identify and contextualise patterns missed by prior error-based work. It shows that non-phonological variation patterns appear even in texts written by atypically variable spellers. Such spelling maintenance confirms that postclassical Greek had a normative orthographic culture; but spelling patterns also show that these are not the Classical conventions applied in the past. Some postclassical norms can be (partly) reconstructed emergently from variant distribution. This is useful to complement discussion of normativity by ancient metalinguistic sources, since it can be difficult to determine to what extent writers of documentary papyri shared the same concepts of norm as surviving grammatical material.

This thesis emphasises the importance of proportional variation in papyrus Greek. It also explores variant co-occurrence as a way of identifying spellers likely to produce progressive and / or contact-influenced morphosyntax. It includes recommendations for improving the encoding and linguistic searchability of digital papyrus editions. For corpus linguists, this thesis innovates in exploring co-occurrence at character rather than collocation level.

Authors: Smith, W

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-r5pzve5or
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: postclassical Greek; spelling variation; spelling; corpus linguistics; historical linguistics; papyrology; ancient Greek
• Subjects: Greek language--history; Spelling errors; Historical linguistics; Greek language, Hellenistic (300 B.C.-600 A.D.); Corpora (linguistics)