L2 Greek in Roman Egypt: Intense language contact in Roman military forts

Abstract

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.

Egyptian Greek: A Contact Variety

“…; Fournet 2003). It seems that an L2 variety of Greek started to develop in the 2nd century ce because at about this time, the same type of nonstandard variants are suddenly found in papyri from Fayyum oasis to Eastern Desert garrisons, mostly involving phonological variation (see also Leiwo 2018Leiwo , 2020 for an analysis of 2nd c. variation in the Eastern Desert). In texts coming from different parts of the realm, there was more widespread variation in the word-final unstressed vowel reduced to schwa and stress-related /o, u/ variation according to the Coptic stress system, as well as iotacism that resulted from consonantto-vowel coarticulation (Dahlgren 2016;Dahlgren 2017: 148-160).…”

“…But the more generally spread nonstandard variants occurring in different corpora with a distance between them could easily have been diffused by the connection between government scribes and army personnel, the corner stones of any colonial conquest. According to Leiwo (2018Leiwo ( , 2020, all letter writers along the military roads linking Roman garrisons were somehow connected to the Roman army. The majority of these letter writers were soldiers, which itself constitutes a connection to Fayyum: this was where soldiers of the Roman army possessed plots of land in the fertile ground of the oasis, along with the Greek immigrants that resided there before the Romans (Dahlgren 2017: 27).…”

“…The majority of these letter writers were soldiers, which itself constitutes a connection to Fayyum: this was where soldiers of the Roman army possessed plots of land in the fertile ground of the oasis, along with the Greek immigrants that resided there before the Romans (Dahlgren 2017: 27). Naturally, the soldiers might have been in touch with civilians for various reasons, including commerce (Leiwo 2020); all these contacts would have made the spread of a contact variety easy.…”

“…This means that the number of second language (L2) Greek speakers with a linguistic background connected to Egyptian-Coptic must have increased in the Roman period. Leiwo (2018Leiwo ( , 2020 argues that the contact features were accelerated because of the intense multilingualism the Roman economic activity brought, prosperous business facilitated by an excellent road network in Roman Egypt. Another factor contributing to this may be an increase in literacy rates by native language (L1) Egyptians due to the gradual emergence of the Coptic script at this time, a far easier writing system than the consonantal, and otherwise complex, Demotic Egyptian script prior to it (e.g.…”

Literary Translingualism in the Greek and Roman Worlds

“…Within the Italian peninsula itself Greek language and culture had a strong foothold in the area known as Magna Graecia, essentially the coastal parts of the boot of Italy and Sicily (Leiwo 1994, Lomas 1993, Tagliapietra 2018, Tribulato 2012, Willi 2008. It is likely that the earliest known named author writing in Latin, the 3 rd -century B.C.E.…”