Aims

The students will receive an introduction, in a systematic way, on the linguistic expressions that were clearly anterior to classic Attic and the postclassical evolution. The students will have to learn important points of the history of the language.

Main themes

The course will mainly be focussed on the study of the archaic language and especially of Homeric poems, of the Koine language, more in particular the New Testament. The courses will be given within a historical context with a lot of comparison points with the Classical Attic language, so that the student has a panoramic view of the history of Greek.
As far as the language of the Homeric poems are concerned, there will be next to the analytical study of numerous extracts, the questions below that, depending on the year, will be the subjects of syntheses:
1. formulaic technique and its links with the linguistic realities ; 2. The dialectical diversity ; 3. The nominal composition ; 4. The mixture between syntactical and paratactical expressions ; 5. The fate of some expression tools such as :demonstrative/article, demonstrative/relative, adverb/conjunction, adverb/preposition, and son.
The extracts of the New Testament have been chosen according to their illustrative value of the evolution of the language, both in morphology as in syntax turns of phrases. The courses request from the students the study of texts as homework.

Content and teaching methods

What kind of Greek was spoken before and after the Classical times?
The lectures will focus on three peculiarly important witnesses:
1- The oldest Greek documents, not written in the alphabet, but in the Linear B syllabary (XIVth-XIIth centuries);
2- The work of Homer (IXth century), the most famous poet of ancient Greece;
3- The koine, wich, from the IVth century onwards, was the equivalent of English nowadays.

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Prerequisite : knowing the particularities of the non-Attic literary Greek.
Evaluation : the ability to personally assimilate and adapt oneself to the application in texts unseen during the courses.
Texts and books : Compilation of texts to illustrate the synthesis courses. Booklets : 1. "Clefs pour aborder le grec littéraire non attique". DUC,1987. 2. "La demarche de l'aède". DUC, 2000.

Programmes in which this activity is taught

Other credits in programs