Can Parent and Daughter co-exist?

[Richard M. Alderson III]

On 21 Sep 1999, Steve Long wrote:

>I guess I was thinking of Arcadian.  But the Aeolic was not far off.  The
>divisions I'm familiar with sometimes class Aeolian with Arcadian-Cypriot.
>They also primarily divide Greek east-west.  Strabo (below) has Arcadian as
>pure Aeolian, from before the latter was hybridized by contact with Doric.

Strabo, of course, was not a modern linguist, with access to information about
Mycenaean Greek, or to any other notion of linguistic change than language
mixture.  At the time Strabo wrote, the Doric dialects had moved southward into
the vacuum created by the de-population of Arcadia in the so-called Catastrophe
of the 12th Century (for which see the writings of, e. g., Drews); Strabo could
see that, unlike Attic and Ionic, Arcadian had /a:/ (a feature shared with both
Doric and Aeolic dialects) but did not share other features with the latter
pair.  The division which he made into East and West Greek was based on the
political realities of the time in which he wrote, coupled with the lacks to
which I referred above.

>Tovar writes: "The weak point in Risch's argument is that it ignores the fact
>that against the innovations which appear in Mycenaean (and Arcado-Cyprian),
>Ionic shows many old forms."

I don't see the relevance to this discussion, though it is relevant to another
thread:  Both sides of this portion of the Greek bush innovated differently.

>2. CB- <<The term "Aeolian" if we consider it widely includes ...

I'm assuming that "CB" is Carl Darling Buck, _The Greek Dialects_, in which you
will find no discussion of Mycenaean, because Linear B had not been deciphered
when he wrote the book, so the only knowledge we had as linguists was of the
situation after the 8th Century, and his conclusions are thus irrelevant to any
post-decipherment discussion in so far as they contradict post-decipherment
knowledge.

You also quote from an article or book by Brian Joseph, without further identi-
fying it to allow others to check the context in which he makes the statements
he makes.  I suspect, given the reference to "East" and "West" Greek, that he
is referring to a later time frame than the _floruit_ of Mycenaean.  Since he
is one of the leading experts in Hellenic linguistics, his comments on how the
older language is related to the later ones reflect 20-25 years more examina-
tion of the data than I have done, but his suggestion of a _koine_ do not in
turn require that we drop the North/South distinction otherwise apparent in the
data.

And again, Strabo is irrelevant.

								Rich Alderson