Plato's Greek and "Attic in the street"

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Barry Hofstetter
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Plato's Greek and "Attic in the street"

Post by Barry Hofstetter »

Some of the recent posts with snippets of Plato have me wondering to what extent Plato's dialogues reflect the actual spoken Greek current in Athens at the time of his writing. Of course these are carefully crafted literary pieces designed to communicate the author's viewpoint but one can write such carefully crafted material and still use contemporary and colloquial speech. Thoughts? Any one know of any books, monographs or treatises on the subject?
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Re: Plato's Greek and "Attic in the street"

Post by bedwere »

Sprechen Sie Attisch? mainly draws from Aristophanes, but also from Plato.

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Re: Plato's Greek and "Attic in the street"

Post by mwh »

They’re best taken as reasonably realistic representations of cultured conversation among the well-educated leisure-classes at Athens (not exclusively Athenian, mind).
Plato and Aristophanes between them get us as close as we can possibly get to contemporary Attic interactive speech. Plato has the disadvantage of representing only a narrow segment of Attic speakers, while Aristophanes has the disadvantage of being metrically constrained.

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Re: Plato's Greek and "Attic in the street"

Post by jeidsath »

Ceccarelli's "Ancient Greek Letter Writing" has a (very) few Attic examples, on potshards or folded lead. I don't know if this is more "street" than Plato's Apology (which specifically makes that claim about its own language), but they are all examples of direct communication without literary pretense.

Together, the Attic examples from Ceccarelli would probably fit on a single page though.
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Re: Plato's Greek and "Attic in the street"

Post by ἑκηβόλος »

Within the sociolinguistic model that "Classical" and early (Attic) "Koine" co-existed, in which the Koine was sociolect of the market, streets and ports, etc. it could be said that the language of the streets was recorded extensively for the first time during the Hellenistic period. Following its broad acceptance, it came to be used across a greater number of domains - official and formal (written) domains, such as the courts and contracts, etc. Simulataneous with the intextualisation of popular speech, the upper class and formal sociolect (Classical Greek, as we call it) continued to be used among the rich, elite and highly educated. A similar thing happened with the recording of the Prakits (venaculars derived from Sanskrit) in forms that were already well developed from the literary and "refined" Sanskrit.

The model that Koine Greek post-dated Classical Greek suffers from the obvious handicap that Attic was always written throughout the Hellenistic period by the educated elite. I use the continuing diglossia model as the basis of my understanding of the linguistic situation of the Hellenistic period. "Common" as in common to a broad spectrum of society, from the the time of the Athenian empire and then through to the later periods. Alexander, who a Macedonian educated in Classical Greek, had the revolutionary idea that everybody's speech could be recorded, and that the everyday speech was indeed worth recording, and that the language of the people could be learned by all people.

The model of the continuing diglossia during the Hellenistic period challenges those who only study "Koine" (usually New Testament) Greek, to also grapple with some of the other sociolects (other literary dialects) that co-existed with the common speech. Seeing the borrowings, or perhaps more accurately the use of stylistic, grammatical and lexical elements of the language across a range of sociolects, gives a realistic or balanced perspective to the Greek of that period.

Attic as the title of this thread directs us to, was a broad spectrum of registers and sociolects, and not limited to the higher literary forms, as has been mentioned.
τί δὲ ἀγαθὸν τῇ πομφόλυγι συνεστώσῃ ἢ κακὸν διαλυθείσῃ;

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Re: Plato's Greek and "Attic in the street"

Post by Barry Hofstetter »

ἑκηβόλος wrote: Alexander, who a Macedonian educated in Classical Greek, had the revolutionary idea that everybody's speech could be recorded, and that the everyday speech was indeed worth recording, and that the language of the people could be learned by all people.
So you think there was a variety of ways of speaking even during the Classical period in Athens. I agree. As to your statement quoted above, what is your source? Is Alexander recorded somewhere as saying this? And did he say it in good Greek? :)
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Re: Plato's Greek and "Attic in the street"

Post by mwh »

I don't believe that Alexander had the “revolutionary idea” that “everybody's speech could be recorded” and that “the language of the people could be learned by all people.” Alexander had military and personal ambition, not hifalutin ideas about recording speech or the language of the people. His far-reaching conquests had the incidental effect of expanding the extent of the Greek-speaking world, that’s all, and the empires established by his generals in Egypt and the East after his death consolidated that and expanded it further. Much of the regional distinctiveness of archaic and classical Greek was inevitably erased in the process.

There is a variety of ways of speaking at any time and place, so naturally there was a variety of ways of speaking in classical Athens. Aristophanes and Plato show us something of the variety.

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Re: Plato's Greek and "Attic in the street"

Post by ἑκηβόλος »

@M@B
As far as quotes, you could find any number of authours, who say something along the lines of, "Alexander's conquest spread Greek language and culture...".

Perhaps, it would be an idea to analyse where we three are talking from on the two points of the nature of the spread, and the motivations for conquered people to be socially and linguistically integrated

I suppose there is a range of meaning for the word "spread", ranging from the very deliberate and planned, to the surprisingly incidental. Hellenisation - the adoption of Greek language and culture - by the people in the newly conquered territories were, doubtless, for a variety of reasons, but the opportunity for such social and cultural advancement (whether one understands Greek language or culture as intrinsic better than other cultures OR as a means of attaining practical access to social advancement, a broader range of services or a greater range of goods) was there to be had.

My understanding of "spread" tends to the deliberate and my supposition of the reason for being hellenised is towards the altruistic end of the scale.
τί δὲ ἀγαθὸν τῇ πομφόλυγι συνεστώσῃ ἢ κακὸν διαλυθείσῃ;

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