Can Parent and Daughter co-exist?

[Sean Crist]

On Mon, 20 Sep 1999 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>> I'm pretty sure I remember this right.  The lastword was that Mycenean was
>> considered almost indistinguishable from Classical period Aeolian.

> -- no, it's _ancestral_ to _South Greek_ dialects like Arcadio-Cypriot.  Not
> to Aeolian.

To a first order of approximation, this is correct; but at a finer level
of detail, it appears that things are a little more complicated.  (Maybe
you already know this; the way you phrased it is the sort of nearly-true
little white lie which one might tell to an introductory class.)

If one were to draw a family tree of the Greek dialects, it might look
something like this:

                      Proto-Greek
                     /   |     \ \______________
                ____/    |      \               \
               /         |       \               \
         West Gk       South Gk   Aiolic      Pamphylian
        (Doric,       | |  |  |
         NW Gk)       | | Myc  \
                     /  |       \
                    /    \       \
                 Attic/  Arcadian Cypriot
                 Ionic

(I hope you can make that out; it's a little hard to draw this complicated
a tree in ASCII!)

I should note right off the bat that it's a little hokey to be drawing a
tree at all in this case, because it is certain that after the original
branching, there were many cases where innovations spread from one dialect
to another.  This is the sort of thing that happens when dialects are
still in contact; much the same thing happened within West Germanic, for
example.  It messes up the tree.  But if you want to draw a tree, this is
probably the right way to draw it.

Also note that Arcadian and Cypriot aren't grouped in this tree as a
single node under the South Greek node. It used to be customary to group
them, but the view now is that Arcadian and Cypriot don't share common
innovations as Attic and Ionic do.

In any case, Mycenaean is very close to Proto-South-Greek, but it has a
few innovations not shared by the later, classical South Greek dialects
which seem to make it an "aunt" rather than a direct ancestor.  For
example, Mycenaean seems to have lost the verb augment, which the other
South Greek dialects retain.  Also, the noun cases are collapsed
differently;  Mycenaean appears to collapse {Dat Loc} {Instr Abl} {Gen}
while the 1st millenium BCE dialects collapse {Dat Loc Inst} {Abl Gen}
(and if you look at it, you'll see that the Myc.  system cannot be the
direct ancestor of the system of the other South Greek dialects).

There might be other such cases, but those are the ones I know about.
(I'll probably know about more later, because I'm taking Linear B this
semester, and what I just wrote are basically a part of my class notes
from Monday. :-)

> And Mycenaean is far more archaic than any Classical dialect whatsoever.  It
> retains the "w" for example, which even Homer drops (Wannax ==> annax) and
> hasn't undergone fundamental shifts like *gw == b (Mycenaean 'guasileus' or
> 'guous' to Classical 'basileus' or 'bous').

Some of the other dialects do retain the "w" down into the classical
period; it shows up in inscriptions in some of the more obscure dialects.
You're quite right about the loss of the labiovelars, tho; and this is one
of those cases where the innovation must have spread thruout the dialect
continuum later, since the same thing happens in the non-South-Greek
dialects as well.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
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