Chrestomathy of Ancient Greek Dialect Inscriptions

The submitted monograph draws on prof. Bartonek´s older Czech monograph „Dialekty klasické rectiny = The Dialects of Classical Greek”, Brno, Munipress, 2009, and presents the translation of his most recent „Chréstomatie staroreckých nárecních nápisu = The Chrestomathy of Ancient Greek Dialect Inscriptions“, Brno 2011. This publication links 174 selected Ancient Greek inscriptions written in ca. 30 Greek dialects, which have been distributed into 5 main Ancient Greek dialect groups (1: Mycenaean Greek, used between 1400-1200 BC on the island of Crete, the Greek mainland /and sporadically even in Asia Minor and Israel/; 2: Attic-Ionic, 3: Arcadian-Cypriot, 4: Aeolic, 5: West Greek (or Doric in wider sense), documented since ca. 800 BC down to the 3rd -5th cent. AD, both in Greece and the Greek colonization regions of the Mediterranean and Black Sea areas).

The selected Ancient Greek inscriptions are presented both in Classical Greek originals and in modern English translations, endowed with brief grammatical commentaries and provided with ca. 60 figures and diagrams - offering in such way an abundant picture of the Ancient Greek dialect relations, including the basic pieces of information on the linguistic classification of individual Ancient Greek dialects. Thematically are the inscriptions considerably varied from inscriptions of religious, historical, economic or juridical contents to moralistic or quite comical memoranda or records of private or fully banal character.

Prof. dr. Antonín Bartonek, DrSc. (born 29. 10. 1926 in Brno /Czech Republic/) is Professor of Classical Philology at Masaryk University in Brno. He deals predominantly with the oldest form of Ancient Greek, epigraphically documented in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC – the so-called Mycenaean Greek, written in syllabic Linear B script and representing an ancient Greek dialect, which has been deciphered by M. Ventris and J. Chadwick in 1952. During his stay at the Heidelberg University, A. Bartonek published the first complex encyclopaedia of this dialect („Handbuch des mykenischen Griechisch“, Universitätsverlag Carl Winter, Heidelberg 2003, 676 pages; translated to Czech, Brno 2007, and Modern Greek, Thessaloniki 2015).

Other fields of A. Bartonek´s research are the following: ethno-linguistic development of Ancient Greek and Latin (Grundzüge der altgriechischen mundartlichen Frühgeschichte, Innsbruck 1991), Homerology, Ancient Greek dialectology (in cooperation with Chr. Tzitzilis, A. Bartonek prepares presently a collective two-volume monograph „Archaies ellinikes dialektoi“ to be published shortly at the University of Thessaloniki), Ancient Greek colonization of the Mediterranean and Black Sea areas, the languages in Ancient Italy, comparative analysis of Greek and Latin against the contemporary European languages („A Comparative Graeco-Latin Sentence Syntax within the European Context“, München, Lincom 2010).

The submitted monograph draws on prof. Bartonek´s older Czech monograph „Dialekty klasické rectiny“, Brno, Munipress, 2009, and presents the translation of his most recent „Chréstomatie staroreckých nárecních nápisu“, Brno 2011, which links 173 selected Ancient Greek inscriptions written in ca. 25 Greek dialects (incl. modern translations, grammatical commentaries and 58 figures and diagrams), offering in such way a complex dialect classification of Ancient Greek.

ISBN 9783862886074 (Hardbound). LINCOM Studies in Indo-European Linguistics 45. 285pp (58 illustrations). 2015.