Re: Help with Greek was Re: Babel Text in Obrenje

Monday, March 11, 2002, 8:25:19 PM, Raymond Brown wrote:

>>> 2. Is Byzantine Greek (let's say the Greek that was spoken in
>>> Constantinople
>>> from the third to the tenth century) Koine Greek?
>>
>>Spoken yes, written no.
RB> Depends who was speaking it.  Written Byzantine Greek has very Atticizing
RB> features and I'm sure the educated speakers affected an Atticist style.
RB> Diglossia goes back a long way in Greek.

I'm only just beginning to plod through an ancient Greek course, but
when I studied 6th and 7th century Near Eastern history at university, the
impression I got from the texts, translations and so on was that Attic
Greek (maybe Atticising would be better) was a learned 'language', and
that its speakers and classically-educated target audience became smaller
and smaller throughout the period. Procopius managed to write his various
works in Attic style quite successfully, but Theophylact Simocatta,
eighty years later, contrived to make a complete mess of it because he
didn't understand it that well. Of the three basic strata, the consciously
classicising writers dried up after Theophylact, while the middlebrow
chroniclers continued in their half-Attic half-Koine melange -- and the
everyday language was already more like modern Greek than ancient.
Of course, I expect there were Atticising revivals at intervals (I
hardly know anything beyond this period, but I take it 'katharevousa'
(sp?) is one), but the early to mid-seventh century saw written
'Attic' Greek dwindle away.
--
Matthew
To the best of my knowledge, at any rate.