Lezing 'A Thousand Years of Dialects in Ancient Crete'
- Voor wie
- Alumni , Medewerkers , Privépersonen , Studenten
- Wanneer
- 06-11-2024 van 19:30 tot 21:00
- Waar
- Leslokaal 0.4, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent
- Voertaal
- Engels
- Door wie
- Department of Literary Studies - Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
- Contact
- annesophie.rouckhout@ugent.be
- Website
- https://www.grieks.ugent.be/griekenlandcentrum/
Dalia Pratali Maffei will speak about the inscriptions and diversity of dialects on the island of Crete.
Crete, the largest of the Greek islands, has brought to us invaluable evidence on Ancient Greek language and its dialectal diversity. In Crete, we found clay tables with the Linear B script, which provide the oldest written evidence of the Greek language.
They date back approximately to the time of the Trojan war, 1,200 BC. There, we also found the so-called “Queen of Inscriptions”, the biggest Ancient Greek inscription ever found, dated roughly around 500 BC.
What can these inscriptions tell us about the Ancient Greek dialects spoken in Crete and how they changed over the thousand years before the arrival of the Romans? And what can these dialects tell us about the speakers’ identity?
Cretans had an ambivalent and liminal identity, as islanders often do, also reflected in the resilience of their dialect to external influence. They were indeed viewed with a certain suspicion by other Greeks – Homer called Cretans a bunch of thieves and liars, and this fame lasted for a thousand years.