This paper will focus on analysing user-related variation in Greek in Egypt as seen through potsherd letters (ostraka) of the residents of Roman forts, praesidia, in the Eastern Desert of Egypt. The letters can be dated to the first and second centuries CE. I suggest that the linguistic situation in the forts can be seen as evidence of extensive language contact that was connected with the considerable economic activity of the Roman Empire. All military forts had several L2 Greek speakers of various ethnicity. In what follows I will suggest that Roman soldiers and their civil partners had created a system that can be described as a feature pool of Greek variables. I suggest that the data from Egypt show that L2 speakers of Greek had an effect on Greek at all grammatical levels, strengthening existing and ongoing endogenous changes by creating substantial contact-induced variation in phonology as well as in morphosyntax and even phraseology. The intense language contact suggests, in my opinion, that language dynamics of this period follow the resilience theory, where various different phases of the adaptive cycle can be simultaneous, as almost all possible varieties of Greek, from historical High Attic to Multiethnic Greek are in use.

The Greek texts from Egypt show extensive nonstandard vowel production, which could cause inadvertent confusion in e.g. Greek mood or case endings. This has previously been seen as evidence of a bad command of Greek, either because of internal phonological change or due to imperfect knowledge of Greek. On closer look numerous similarities to the nonstandard vowel production in Greek texts can also be found in native Egyptian texts. Greek loanwords in Coptic are treated according to Coptic phonological rules and show nonstandard vowel usage of the same nature that is present in Greek in some sociolects. The nonstandard spellings present evidence of underdifferentiation of Greek phonemes as well as transfer elements of the Egyptian prosodic system. The vowel usage is examined within the framework of L2WS (second language writing systems) studies, and evidence for the coarticulatory effect of the consonants on the vowels' quality is drawn from the field of articulatory phonetics.

Speakers of Greek and Latin were in contact for several hundred years. This chapter proposes a typology for distinct language contact features in the light of epigraphy, and discusses Latin-Greek contact in Italy through the language transmitted by Christian and Jewish speech communities from the third to the sixth century AD. Two distinct conceptions should be kept in mind: languages in contact and contact languages. When languages are in contact, the contact may create linguistic change and even structural similarity in the course of time. The chapter examines what kind of contact situations can be seen in the epigraphic evidence, for example, whether the features of linguistic mixture are caused by bilingual code-switching.

No abstract

No abstract