🗣️ The dialects and Homer

Ancient Greek was never one language with one norm. Every region had its dialect, and every literary genre took its own: epic Homer's mixed Ionic, history and medicine Ionic (Herodotus, Hippocrates), choral lyric a literary Doric, love lyric Aeolic (Sappho, Alcaeus), drama and prose Attic. Attic became the base of the Koine and so of every later Greek (chapter 17). This manual describes Attic; this chapter gives the main dialects and how they differ from it, and the language of Homer, which is the largest part of the classical treebank.

Contents

1. The dialect groups
2. The marks that tell them apart
3. Ionic
4. Doric
5. Aeolic
6. The language of Homer
7. How Mova handles it
8. Sources

1. The dialect groups

(smyth-1920, Introduction: the Greek language and its dialects)

2. The marks that tell them apart

(smyth-1920 §30 for Attic η and ᾱ, and the dialect notes «D» throughout the morphology)

3. Ionic

Herodotus' Ionic:

• has η for every Attic ᾱ: ἱστορίη, χώρη;
• leaves many vowels uncontracted: ποιέειν, νόος;
• has κ for π in the pronouns: κῶς, κοῦ, κότε for πῶς, ποῦ, πότε;
• has no rough breathing (psilosis): ἀπίκετο for ἀφίκετο;
• uses the τ- forms of the article as relatives: τόν "whom";
• has the dative plural -οισι, -ῃσι.

PROIEL's Greek includes the Histories of Herodotus (NC, counted only). Its word order and moods are counted in chapter 13, §5 and chapter 14, §9.

4. Doric

Doric keeps the old ᾱ (Δᾶμος for δῆμος, ἁ for ἡ), has τοί, ταί in the article, -μες for -μεν in the 1st plural (λέγομες), the future in -σέω (contract) and the infinitive in -εν. Its literary form colours the choral odes of Attic tragedy: a tragic chorus says ἁ μάτηρ where the actors say ἡ μήτηρ.

5. Aeolic

Lesbian Aeolic, the language of Sappho and Alcaeus:

• has no rough breathing;
• throws the accent back as far as it can (recessive accent everywhere: βάσιλευς);
• has -οισα for -ουσα in participles, ζ for δ in some words;
• conjugates contract verbs as -μι verbs (φίλημι for φιλέω).

6. The language of Homer

Homer's language was never spoken anywhere. It is an artificial epic language grown over centuries of oral poetry: an Ionic base, with an older Aeolic layer and a few Arcado-Cypriot words. It keeps alternative forms side by side because the metre needs one shape here and another there (smyth-1920, the «D» notes; Monro 1891):

• genitive singular -οιο beside -ου, -ᾱο and -εω for the first declension: θεοῖο, Ἀτρείδᾱο;
• dative plural -οισι, -ῃσι, -εσσι (πόδεσσι);
• infinitives -μεν, -μεναι beside -ειν: ἔμμεναι, ἔμεν for εἶναι;
• the augment often absent: βῆ for ἔβη;
• the article still a demonstrative or relative (chapter 5, §2);
• the subjunctive with a short vowel: ἴομεν "let us go";
• κε(ν) beside ἄν;
• the suffix -φι(ν) for an instrumental or locative: βίηφι "by force";
• tmesis (chapter 15, §6);
• uncontracted and "distracted" forms: ὁρόωντες for ὁρῶντες;
• the digamma, lost in the script but felt in the metre: the hiatus in τὸν δ᾽ ἠμείβετ᾽ ἔπειτα ἄναξ (ϝάναξ).

The Homeric treebank. Homer is the largest part of the Perseus training set: 6,003 sentences from the Iliad and the Odyssey (tlg0012), against 2,360 of Sophocles and 1,092 of Herodotus (UD 2.18, counted 2026-10-22). Perseus is NC, so Mova counts on it and never quotes it.

7. How Mova handles it

In the UD trees.

• A dialect form has its Attic lemma: θεοῖο → θεός, ἔμμεναι → εἰμί, Ἀτρείδᾱο → Ἀτρείδης.
• Homeric forms are tagged with their ordinary features.
• PTNK (the Septuagint) has no dialect forms beyond the Koine's own.

In Mova. A Greek morphology for Mova should be built on Attic, with dialect rules as alternatives, never as a second lexicon:

• the ᾱ/η exchange;
• -σσ- for -ττ-;
• the open vowels for the contracted;
• the Homeric endings of §6;
• the psilosis of Ionic and Aeolic.

Each rule maps a dialect form to its Attic counterpart, which the lexicon looks up. The rules are short, deterministic and testable form by form against the lemmas of the treebanks: a rule that maps θεοῖο to θεός can be checked on every Homeric genitive in Perseus. The same method serves the Latin spellings of the charters (la chapter 14, §9).

8. Sources

• Smyth, H. W. 1920 (smyth-1920): the Introduction (the dialects), §30, and the dialect notes «D» throughout, paraphrased from the Perseus text (CC BY-SA).
• Monro, D. B. 1891, A Grammar of the Homeric Dialect (monro-1891-grammar-homeric-dialect), public domain.
• Buck, C. D. 1910, Introduction to the Study of the Greek Dialects, public domain; not yet in our library (wanted).
• UD Ancient Greek Perseus and PROIEL (CC BY-NC-SA): counts only.

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/grc/16-dialects/