Whereas most scholars refer to two levels of Greek in the Byzantine Middle Ages (the written register and the spoken language, sometimes identified with the label of Byzantine koine), the author advocates for the presence of a three-level scale forming a language continuum, whose extremes are represented by the Atticist or Classicizing Greek and the…
In this presentation I report on results that a Leuven team of scholars has reached since November 2024 in the context of ongoing project research on New Ancient Greek literature in the Early Modern Low Countries (ca. 1484–1700) and that relate to the influence of Byzantine culture on that literature. It is well known that…
In the tenth century Basil, metropolitan of Neopatrai, wrote a commentary on the prophetical books of the Greek Old Testament, starting with the twelve minor prophets followed by Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezechiel and Daniel. This Commentary is a monumental work of Byzantine biblical exegesis, which so farreceived little attention from modern scholars. Basil’s work stands out…
The aim of this paper is to analyze the transition of the phrase ποιέω ἀγάπην (‘to do a favour’) from a polysemic collocation to the intersubjective politeness marker ποίησον ἀγάπην (‘please’) in Byzantine Greek. While it has been repeatedly emphasized that collocations interact with syntax and semantics (Baños et al., 2022; Fendel, 2024), their pragmatic…