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Towards a Grammar ofByzantine GreekStaffan WahlgrenPublished online: 06 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Staffan Wahlgren (2002): Towards a Grammar ofByzantine Greek, Symbolae Osloenses: Norwegian Journal of Greekand Latin Studies, 77:1, 201-204

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TOWARDS A GRAMMAR OF BYZANTINE GREEK*

STAFFAN WAHLGREN

The title of my paper might need some clarification. I am concerned with aspectsof the description of written Greek from the Byzantine era. I am not trying towrite the Byzantine grammar, I am simply interested in looking at thepossibilities and the desirability of certain kinds of research. I do, however, takeas my starting-point the conviction that language is an underdeveloped field ofresearch in Byzantine studies.

Within general linguistics there are mechanisms at work which, paradoxically,have acted restrictingly on the study of language, and there has been, indeed stillis, a strong tendency among linguists to consider spoken language as the only reallanguage. “Natural” is one of several epithets with a positive connotation given tospoken language.1 And this has hit hard the study of historical languages, and,consequently, has resulted in less than adequate support from general linguistics.This neglect is felt particularly in cases of languages with strong diglossicphenomena, such as Greek. In these cases the diglossia in itself may very well beconsidered an interesting object of study, but not the high level language as such.2

Now, in ancient Greek studies, we have to some extent been able tocompensate for this lack of support from general linguistics. A research tradition

1 Another is “spontaneous”. The scientific discovery of the spoken language has to do with thedevelopment of new fields of linguistic enquiry, such as phonology, and with a scholarlygeneration including F. de Saussure; almost any post-Saussurian grammatical work could becited as evidence for the tendency to give primacy to the spoken language. A more favourableattitude towards written language can be discerned in recent works, such as G. Horrocks,Greek: a History of the Language and its Speakers (London/New York 1997) and J. Niehoff-Panagiotidis, Koine und Diglossie (Wiesbaden 1994).2 Katharevousa has been ignored by scholars, increasingly so as society has made less and lessuse of that form of language; some work on katharevousa was done in the 19th and early 20thcenturies by scholars such as Krumbacher and Kalitsunakis. Noteworthy is Babiniotis, who hasshown an interest in katharevousa in our time—this, however, in an attempt to argue that oneshould accept and promote a Neohellenic Koine on the basis of linguistic phenomena whichinclude katharevousa. Other examples of languages with diglossic situations, where a higher or“less natural” form is being suppressed, are: literary Arabic which, at least in present-dayscholarship, is relatively seldom dealt with, whereas the dialects attract much attention;nynorsk, “New Norwegian”, which has a long tradition of being described only normatively;mediaeval Latin which has been neglected almost as completely as Byzantine Greek (for whichsee below), although developments, which eventually will produce a grammatical descriptionof mediaeval Latin, are now in progress.

*This is an annotated and slightly revised version of a paper read at the XXe congreÁ sinternational des e tudes Byzantines, Paris, August 2001. Thanks to professor Tomas HaÈ gg,Bergen, and to my family for criticism.

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of its own has developed which has had its strong points, especially in theintimate knowledge of the material and in the understanding of the problems ofits transmission.3

But when we turn to Byzantium it is obvious that the lack of linguistic backinghas not been compensated for. Only very few works analyse the grammaticalstructure of Byzantine texts, and the fact, or the impression, that a text representsan extreme form of high level Greek has generally meant that it has not beenconsidered necessary to deal with its linguistic form. High level Greek inByzantium is, accordingly, simply ancient Greek, good or bad: if good, notnecessary to deal with; if bad, not worthy of attention. Of course, the history ofhow so much Byzantine Greek has been neglected is a much wider issue thanhinted at here. And part of the reason why so little large-scale investigation hasbeen carried out is, surely, to be found in the practical and methodologicaldifficulties involved. Nevertheless, I think the present diagnosis contains sometruth of importance.

Let us now take a look at two specific examples; the first illustrates the attitudetowards Byzantine Greek described above; the second is an actual investigation—quite a good one, but one which tells us much about the shortcomings of mostwork that has been done so far.4

First, R. Browning in his Medieval and Modern Greek and in his short outlineon post-classical Greek in the Introduction to Greek Philology edited by H.-G.Nesselrath.5 Browning deals exclusively with the spoken language, and hisattitude towards other levels of linguistic production in Byzantium is bestdescribed as irritable; the high level language—which for him is ancient Greek—is the lamentable device which in particular conceals the real thing—how peopletalked—from us. It is, in fact, one of those distorting mirrors.

3 Apart from the research which has produced our handbooks on the classical language, onemay mention exponents of the Greek branch of the grammatical tradition which goes back toE. LoÈ fstedt’s post-classical Latin studies, e.g.: C. Fabricius, Zu den Jugendschriften des JohannesChrysostomos (Lund 1962); K. Hult, Syntactic Variation in Greek of the 5th Century A.D.(GoÈ teborg 1990).4 There are, of course, more studies to be mentioned. Interesting but problematic are those byHunger and SÏ evcÏ enko on levels of style, dealing with the phenomenon of metaphrasis (e.g. H.Hunger-I. SÏ evcÏ enko, Des Nikephoros Blemmydes Basiliko�w ’Andria�w und dessen Metaphrasevon Georgios Galesiotes und Georgios Oinaiotes: ein weiterer Beitrag zum VerstaÈ ndnis derbyzantinischen Schrift-Koine (Wien 1986), with references to the authors’ earlier work on levelsof style, e.g. I. SÏ evcÏ enko, “Levels of Style in Byzantine Prose”, Jahrbuch der oÈ sterreichischenByzantinistik 31.1 (1981) 290-312). Both Hunger’s and SÏ evcÏ enko’s studies tend to containextensive lists with alternative constructions; one may wonder what synthesis the authors hadin mind when they abandoned this line of research. I fear there is a risk that this kind ofpresentation will perpetuate the conception of Byzantine Greek as consisting of two, or more,distinct levels of style, of which the higher is looked upon as ancient Greek.5 R. Browning, Medieval and Modern Greek (Cambridge etc. 1983) (2nd ed.). H.-G.Nesselrath, Einleitung in die griechische Philologie (Stuttgart-Leipzig 1997, 156-168).

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My example of a detailed study is G. BoÈ hlig’s Der rhetorische Sprachgebrauchder Byzantiner, a work much more limited in scope than the title seems to imply.6It concentrates on Psellos, and the comparison made with other Byzantineauthors is restricted and unsystematic. It also has other shortcomings that reveal alack of theoretical framework. It contains, for example, a jungle of interspersedinformation on how the finds relate to the sayings of the ancient grammarians, orto ancient Greek. And it is clear that standard knowledge of ancient Greek, muchmore than Psellos or his times, has shaped the investigation.

In fact, the only comprehensive study there is of a genre in Byzantine Greek isstill St. Psaltes’ Grammatik der byzantinischen Chroniken, which, unfortunately,lacks a syntax.7

So far the research situation. What I would also like to do is to outline aresearch project.

First, when it comes to time, genre and language level, I think one shouldsimply postpone all discussion on where in time to begin, or end, a grammar ofByzantine Greek, what kind of texts to include and so on. One should reallybegin work on material from any one period, from one generation, and fromtexts which seem to be of the same type and level. The question as to what textsare suitably included in one and the same work should be faced when more datahave been collected.

But the openness implied in this work policy should run in other directionstoo. If we really want to deepen our knowledge of Byzantine Greek, our effortshould be in the form of a multi-step project, with each step autonomous and ameaningful contribution to Byzantine studies in its own right. Further, we shouldavoid a situation where one researcher, or group, spends years, or decades,preparing work which is then considered as final and cannot be added to. Weshould consider cooperation and the sharing of interim results.

Now for the project. Taking for granted that the problem of getting texts intomachine-readable form is, more or less, a problem of the past, I turn to thequestion whether we should compile an annotated corpus of Byzantine texts.8Annotation, or tagging, is a term used by general linguists to describe a widerange of techniques whereby word classes, syntactical relations or semantical or

6 G. BoÈ hlig, Der rhetorische Sprachgebrauch der Byzantiner (Berlin 1956).7 St. Psaltes, Grammatik der byzantinischen Chroniken (GoÈ ttingen 1974) (2nd ed.). Even forthe fields which it covers it explicitly limits itself to points where the Byzantine usage isdifferent from the classical, i.e. it does not give an overall picture of the normal usage in a givensituation. Cf. n. 11 below.8 There are several projects aiming at providing texts in machine-readable form, notably theTLG-project at Irvine (Cal.). It is also getting quite easy to scan texts on one’s own. As onepreliminary stage of a comprehensive research effort one should also consider the need for abibliographie raisonne e; the bibliographical tools at our disposal so far are, chiefly, thesupplement of BZ, and Ph. D. Apostolopoulos, Inventaire me thodique de linguistique byzantine(Thessaloniki 1994).

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pragmatical information are marked in a text, normally in an ordinary text-filewith footnotes.9

Such a corpus would be something quite new in Byzantine studies. One pointin its favour would be its use for many purposes, even purposes not originallyenvisaged by the compiler.

I am myself contemplating making a start. I am thinking about compiling andtagging a corpus of Byzantine texts, most likely high level texts, and to make thecorpus available on the Internet.10

In addition, I am thinking about making a limited number of investigationsand illustrating some uses to which this corpus could be put. In doing so, I planto ignore ancient Greek completely. I shall try to provide an analysis of Byzantinelinguistic usage.

To conclude, I am not unaware of the difficulties that the comprehensivedescription of Byzantine Greek will involve. At the same time, I do think thatsome of the objections raised against such an undertaking are open to discussion.

It has often been claimed that we do not yet have adequate editions ofByzantine texts. I think we have. First, it is a mistake to believe that most neweditions will change the picture to any extent, not at least as far as syntax isconcerned. My own edition of the Chronicle of the Logothete will not addanything of importance to our grammatical knowledge. Nor does a grammarhave to aim at completeness in the same way as a lexicon.11

It has also been claimed that the referential systems of the Byzantine writerwere fixed in antiquity, and that high level Byzantine Greek is nothing but themore or less perfect internalization of ancient Greek.12 This is, to say the least, agross underestimation of the Byzantine writer and denies the existence ofinherent dynamics in his or her language.

Let us therefore look at Byzantine Greek with fresh eyes, with a view toliberating it from its classical bonds.

Norwegian University of Science and TechnologyDepartment of History/Classical Studies

9 There is a growing literature on the general subject of annotation, e.g.: H. v. Halteren,Syntactic Wordclass Tagging (Dordrecht/Boston 1999); R. Garside et al., Corpus Annotation(London/New York 1997); J. Svartvik (ed.), Directions in Corpus Linguistics (Berlin/New York

1992). See also http://www.ruf.rice.edu/] barlow/corpus.html10 I am planning to start with either the mid-Byzantine era (probably with the two mid-quarters of the 10th c.) or with the age of the Palaiologoi (if so probably with the first half of the

14th c.).11 Even the best Byzantine lexicons are, I think without exception, incomplete in the sensethat they only deal with the points where Byzantine Greek differs from ancient Greek. Thisproduces a distorted picture of Byzantine usage, and testifies to the inferior status enjoyed byByzantium, in the eyes of posterity, as compared with antiquity. Cf. n. 7 above.12 This is reflected even in such an excellent work as J. Niehoff-Panagiotidis, op. cit., p. 189:“die Schriftsprache entwickelt sich intentional nicht.”

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