Language contact in historical documents: the identification and co-occurrence of Egyptian transfer features in Greek documentary papyri
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Sonja Dahlgren
Abstract
The Egyptian-Greek contact situation has lasted almost a thousand years and many documents have been preserved to us from this period. In this paper, we apply a new quantitative approach to this rich corpus of documentary papyri to map the relationships between the linguistic variables (the variant spellings) and several non-linguistic variables. A multidimensional scaling of the co-occurrences of the linguistic variables shows that there is a strong association between most of the Greek variant spellings that can be explained by Egyptian phonological transfer, while others do not typically co-occur with them. Several new linguistic variables not yet connected to Egyptian phonological transfer also show a strong relation with the first group of features, some of them representing the same phonological transfer processes. A comparison of the contexts in which these variables are used allows us to further substantiate this observation: several of the previously and newly Egyptian-associated variables turn out to have a strong correlation with bilingual Egyptian-Greek documents or occur in Egyptian dominated environments. The spelling variants are chronologically dependent and different features are typically associated with different historical periods illustrating changes taking place in the Egyptian Greek contact variety over time. A multiple correspondence analysis shows that the variables strongly interact, illustrating the importance of a multifactorial approach combining various linguistic and non-linguistic factors.
Funding source: The Research Foundation - Flanders
Award Identifier / Grant number: FWO16/PDO/181
Funding source: European Research Council
Award Identifier / Grant number: 758481
Funding source: The Research Foundation - Flanders
Award Identifier / Grant number: 1162017N
Acknowledgments
The research by Joanne Stolk was funded by The Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO16/PDO/181), the research by Sonja Dahlgren was part of the project Digital Grammar of Greek Documentary Papyri (PapyGreek), funded by an ERC Starting Grant (No. 758481) and the research by Alek Keersemaekers was funded by The Research Foundation – Flanders (1162017N).
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Syntactic alternations and socio-stylistic constraints: the case of asyndetic complementation in the history of Spanish
- Changes in the proverb formula in Finnish Bibles from 1642 to 1992
- Tracking subject position change in U.S. Southwest Spanish: what 19th and 20th century Tucson newspapers tell us
- The rationalisation of vowel diacritic spelling in Early Modern English (1500–1700)
- Language contact in historical documents: the identification and co-occurrence of Egyptian transfer features in Greek documentary papyri
- Book Reviews
- Florian Dolberg: Agreement in language contact: Gender development in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Studies in Language Companion Series 208)
- Merja, Stenroos & Kjetil V. Thengs: Records of real people: linguistic variation in Middle English local documents (Advances in historical sociolinguistics 11)
- Ewa Jonsson and Tove Larsson: Voices past and present – Studies of involved, speech-related and spoken texts. In honor of Merja Kytö. (Studies in Corpus Linguistics 97)
- Laura Wright: The multilingual origins of Standard English (Topics in English Linguistics 107)
- Robert McColl Millar: A Sociolinguistic History of Scotland
- Corrigendum
- Talking like a servant: What nineteenth century novels can tell us about the social history of the language
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Syntactic alternations and socio-stylistic constraints: the case of asyndetic complementation in the history of Spanish
- Changes in the proverb formula in Finnish Bibles from 1642 to 1992
- Tracking subject position change in U.S. Southwest Spanish: what 19th and 20th century Tucson newspapers tell us
- The rationalisation of vowel diacritic spelling in Early Modern English (1500–1700)
- Language contact in historical documents: the identification and co-occurrence of Egyptian transfer features in Greek documentary papyri
- Book Reviews
- Florian Dolberg: Agreement in language contact: Gender development in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Studies in Language Companion Series 208)
- Merja, Stenroos & Kjetil V. Thengs: Records of real people: linguistic variation in Middle English local documents (Advances in historical sociolinguistics 11)
- Ewa Jonsson and Tove Larsson: Voices past and present – Studies of involved, speech-related and spoken texts. In honor of Merja Kytö. (Studies in Corpus Linguistics 97)
- Laura Wright: The multilingual origins of Standard English (Topics in English Linguistics 107)
- Robert McColl Millar: A Sociolinguistic History of Scotland
- Corrigendum
- Talking like a servant: What nineteenth century novels can tell us about the social history of the language
