Eleanor Dickey

Forms of address and terms of reference

This paper examines the relationship between the use of names and other words in address and in reference: how does the way that speaker A addresses B differ from the way that A refers to B, and what are the factors affecting this difference? The study, based on observation and interviews, attempts both to solve a problem in pragmatics and to help historical linguists and others who need to know the extent to which it may be justified to extrapolate from referential to address usage and vice versa.

Literal and extended use of kinship terms in documentary papyri

Kinship terms in papyrus letters do not always refer to actual relatives and so pose many problems for modern readers. But by examining all the kinship terms in six centuries of letters it is possible to discover some rules governing the use of kinship terms: in some situations they appear to be always literal, and in others they appear to be almost always extended, though a third group of contexts remains ambiguous. The rules are complex and depend on the particular kinship term involved, the date of writing, the use of names, the position of the kinship term in the letter, and the person to whom it connects the referent.

The ancient Greek address system and some proposed sociolinguistic universals

This article summarizes the results of a longer study of address forms in Ancient Greek, based on 11,891 address tokens from a variety of sources. It argues that the Greek evidence appears to contradict two tendencies, found in address forms in other languages, which have been claimed as possible sociolinguistic universals: the tendency toward T/V distinctions, and the principle that “What is new is polite.” It is suggested that these alleged universals should perhaps be re-examined in light of the Greek evidence, and that ancient languages in general have more to contribute to sociolinguistics than is sometimes realized. (Address, Ancient Greek, T/V distinctions)

HOW TO SAY ‘PLEASE’ IN CLASSICAL LATIN

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ΚΥΡΙΕ, ΔΕΣΠΟΤΑ, Domine . Greek Politeness in the Roman Empire

Why did the Greeks of the Roman period make such extensive use of the vocative κύριe, when Greeks of earlier periods had been content with only one vocative meaning ‘master’, δέσποτα? This study, based primarily on a comprehensive search of documentary papyri but also making extensive use of literary evidence (particularly that of the Septuagint and New Testament), traces the development of both terms from the classical period to the seventh century AD. It concludes that κύριe was created to provide a translation for Latin domine , and that domine , which has often been considered a translation of κύριe, had a Roman origin. In addition, both κύριe and domine were from their beginnings much less deferential than is traditionally supposed, so that neither term underwent the process of ‘weakening’ which converted English ‘master’ into ‘Mr’. δέσποτα, which was originally far more deferential than the other two terms, did undergo some weakening, but not (until a very late period) as much as is usually supposed. These findings in turn imply that Imperial politeness has been somewhat misunderstood and suggest that the Greeks of the first few centuries AD were much less servile in their language than is traditionally assumed.

Forms of Address and Conversational Language in Aristophanes and Menander

indicating that Sico spoke oddly? Probably not. Although there is a cook with peculiar linguistic habits in Stratons comedy F??????d??, that cook cannot be taken as representing a general tendency of cooks in New Comedy. His obscure Homeric words are quoted not from his own lips but from those of someone else who is complaining about his language, clearly for comic effect. Sico in Dyscolus, on the other hand, is not caricatured for his use of language, and except in this passage, his Greek appears to be perfectly normal. We must thus assume that Menander meant the cooks instruc-

Politeness in ancient Rome: Can it help us evaluate modern politeness theories?

Abstract This paper takes four frameworks for understanding linguistic politeness (Brown and Levinson, Watts, Terkourafi, Hall) and tests each on the same corpus to see whether they yield results that are useful and/or in keeping with the other information we have about the material. The corpus used consists of 661 polite requests made in letters by a single Roman author, Cicero. The results demonstrate first that politeness theories are helpful as explanatory tools even in dealing with very well-known material, and second that no one theory is best: different theories are more and less useful in answering different questions about the data. It is therefore suggested that the use of multiple frameworks will provide the best understanding of the data.

What Good Is a Rebellious Teenager? Classics and Linguistics in the Twentieth Century

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The Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana in the Greek East

There has been much debate about the place of origin of the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana, a large collection of bilingual language-learning materials found in papyri and medieval manuscripts: do they come from the centre, being created to teach Greek in Rome, or from the periphery, being created to teach Latin to Greek speakers? Evidence from their contents suggests a composite origin, with a core of early material from the centre to which has been added much material from the Greek-speaking periphery during the Roman Empire followed by a little material from late antique Gaul. When the Hermeneumata are compared with other Latin-learning materials from the Eastern Empire (i.e. papyri), they turn out to provide only one component of a large and varied group of materials; on their own they provide a rather misleading view of what ancient Latin-learning texts were like, though the descriptions of schools in the schoolbook sections of the colloquia give a more comprehensive impression. But what kind of schools do those descriptions really focus on: the Roman schools about which they were originally written, or the Greek schools in which they were used? The Colloquium Stephani may offer an answer to this question, for it appears to have remained in the centre and does not contain material from the periphery. In terms of content this version is very close to the others, suggesting that the others have not been significantly altered, but in tone it is very different, being full of moral exempla of a type characteristic of Roman education. Thus it is likely that the school descriptions in the other colloquia have been significantly altered in tone, but not in content.

Classical scholarship: the Byzantine contribution

Discusses the effect that Byzantine work has had on our perception of ancient Greek language and literature (especially Homer and drama).