Marja Vierros
University of Helsinki, Department of Languages, Faculty Member
- Classics, Egyptian language, Latin Language and Literature, Sociolinguistics, Greek Language, Multi- & Bilingualism & Biliteracy, and 11 morePapyrology, Greek Epigraphy, Palaeography, Ancient History, Ancient Greek History, Demotic, Hellenistic History, Digital Humanities, Corpus Linguistics, Ancient Greek Language, and Hellenistic Egyptedit
- Associate professor of Classical Philology at the University of Helsinki, PI of ERC Starting Grant project Digital Gr... moreAssociate professor of Classical Philology at the University of Helsinki, PI of ERC Starting Grant project Digital Grammar of Greek Documentary Papyri (Grant Agreement No 758481). Working with languages and linguistic variation, language contact and bilingualism using mainly Greek papyrological sources.edit
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The impact of Greek-Egyptian bilingualism on language use and linguistic competence is the key issue in this dissertation. The language use in a corpus of 148 Greek notarial contracts is analyzed on phonological, morphological and... more
The impact of Greek-Egyptian bilingualism on language use and linguistic competence is the key issue in this dissertation. The language use in a corpus of 148 Greek notarial contracts is analyzed on phonological, morphological and syntactic levels. The texts were written by bilingual notaries (agoranomoi) in Upper Egypt in the later Hellenistic period. They present, for the most part, very good administrative Greek. On the other hand, their language contains variation and idiosyncrasies that were earlier condemned as ungrammatical and bad Greek, and were not subjected to closer analysis.
In order to reach plausible explanations for those phenomena, a thorough research into the sociohistorical and linguistic context was needed before the linguistic analysis. The general linguistic landscape, the population pattern and the status and frequency of Greek literacy in Ptolemaic Egypt in general, and in Upper Egypt in particular, are presented. Through a detailed examination of the notaries themselves (their names, families and handwriting), it became evident that there were one to three persons at the notarial office writing under the signature of one notary. Often the documents under one notary's name were written in the same hand. We get, therefore, exceptionally close to studying idiolects in written material from antiquity.
The qualitative linguistic analysis revealed that the notaries made relatively few orthographic mistakes that reflect the ongoing phonological changes and they mastered the morphological forms. The problems arose at the syntactic level, for example, with the pattern of agreement between the noun groups or a noun with its modifiers. The significant structural differences between Greek and Egyptian can be behind the innovative strategies used by some of the notaries. Moreover, certain syntactic structures were clearly transferred from the notaries first language, Egyptian. This is obvious in the relative clause structure. Transfer can be found in other structures, as well, although, we must not forget the influence of parallel Greek structures. Sometimes these can act simultaneously.
The interesting linguistic strategies and transfer features come mostly from the hand of one notary, Hermias. Some other notaries show similar patterns, for example, Hermias' cousin, Ammonios. Hermias' texts reveal that he probably spoke Greek more than his predecessors. It is possible to conclude, then, that the notaries of the later generations were more fluently bilingual; their two languages were partly integrated in their minds as an interlanguage combining elements from both languages. The earlier notaries had the two languages functionally separated and they followed the standardized contract formulae more rigidly.
In order to reach plausible explanations for those phenomena, a thorough research into the sociohistorical and linguistic context was needed before the linguistic analysis. The general linguistic landscape, the population pattern and the status and frequency of Greek literacy in Ptolemaic Egypt in general, and in Upper Egypt in particular, are presented. Through a detailed examination of the notaries themselves (their names, families and handwriting), it became evident that there were one to three persons at the notarial office writing under the signature of one notary. Often the documents under one notary's name were written in the same hand. We get, therefore, exceptionally close to studying idiolects in written material from antiquity.
The qualitative linguistic analysis revealed that the notaries made relatively few orthographic mistakes that reflect the ongoing phonological changes and they mastered the morphological forms. The problems arose at the syntactic level, for example, with the pattern of agreement between the noun groups or a noun with its modifiers. The significant structural differences between Greek and Egyptian can be behind the innovative strategies used by some of the notaries. Moreover, certain syntactic structures were clearly transferred from the notaries first language, Egyptian. This is obvious in the relative clause structure. Transfer can be found in other structures, as well, although, we must not forget the influence of parallel Greek structures. Sometimes these can act simultaneously.
The interesting linguistic strategies and transfer features come mostly from the hand of one notary, Hermias. Some other notaries show similar patterns, for example, Hermias' cousin, Ammonios. Hermias' texts reveal that he probably spoke Greek more than his predecessors. It is possible to conclude, then, that the notaries of the later generations were more fluently bilingual; their two languages were partly integrated in their minds as an interlanguage combining elements from both languages. The earlier notaries had the two languages functionally separated and they followed the standardized contract formulae more rigidly.
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Greek documentary papyri form an important direct source for Ancient Greek. It has been exploited surprisingly little in Greek linguistics due to a lack of good tools for searching linguistic structures. This article presents a new tool... more
Greek documentary papyri form an important direct source for Ancient Greek. It has been exploited surprisingly little in Greek linguistics due to a lack of good tools for searching linguistic structures. This article presents a new tool and digital platform, “Sematia”, which enables transforming the digital texts available in TEI EpiDoc XML format to a format which can be morphologically and syntactically annotated (treebanked), and where the user can add new metadata concerning the text type, writer and handwriting of each act of writing. An important aspect in this process is to take into account the original surviving writing vs. the standardization of language and supplements made by the editors. This is performed by creating two different layers of the same text. The platform is in its early development phase. Ongoing and future developments, such as tagging linguistic variation phenomena as well as queries performed within Sematia, are discussed at the end of the article.
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The public notaries (agoranomoi) and the documents produced in the agoranomic offices in the Pathyrite area have been discussed from several points of view over the previous decades. Four duplicates and some single copies of contracts... more
The public notaries (agoranomoi) and the documents produced in the agoranomic offices in the Pathyrite area have been discussed from several points of view over the previous decades. Four duplicates and some single copies of contracts have been preserved in the Pathyris archives, but they have not previously been studied from the point of view of copying practices. Therefore, a closer examination focusing on this aspect is warranted. This article is an addition to the — still rather thin — general discussion on copying practices in the documentary papyri from Egypt.
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The chapter discusses the Katochoi archive from the point of view of idiolects. Several documents written in the hands of Apollonios and Ptolemaios, sons of Glaukias, can be identified within the archive, which comprises of several types... more
The chapter discusses the Katochoi archive from the point of view of idiolects. Several documents written in the hands of Apollonios and Ptolemaios, sons of Glaukias, can be identified within the archive, which comprises of several types of documents. I study whether these autograph texts can be said to represent the idiolects of Apollonios and Ptolemaios and how this perspective might change our interpretation of the interesting linguistic variation found in the whole archive. Apollonios, for example, wrote many drafts and copies which do not necessarily reflect his personal language use in the morphological or syntactic levels. However, the orthography reveals individual practices. I will present examples of language use by both brothers, comparing them to the scribal language use found in the same archive.
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Publication of Greek papyrus, P.Petra V 72
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Publication of a Greek papyrus, P.Petra V 71, Agreement.
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Publication of a Greek papyrus, P.Petra V 66, a request for transfer of taxation
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Publication of Greek papyrus P.Petra V 65, a request for transfer of taxation.
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The public notaries (agoranomoi) and the documents produced in the agoranomic offices in the Pathyrite area have been discussed from several points of view over the previous decades. Four duplicates and some single copies of... more
The public notaries (agoranomoi) and the documents produced in the agoranomic offices in the Pathyrite area have been discussed from several
points of view over the previous decades. Four duplicates and some single copies of contracts have been preserved in the Pathyris archives, but they have not previously been studied from the point of view of copying practices. Therefore, a closer examination focusing on this aspect is warranted. This article is an addition to the — still rather thin — general discussion on copying practices in the documentary papyri from Egypt.
points of view over the previous decades. Four duplicates and some single copies of contracts have been preserved in the Pathyris archives, but they have not previously been studied from the point of view of copying practices. Therefore, a closer examination focusing on this aspect is warranted. This article is an addition to the — still rather thin — general discussion on copying practices in the documentary papyri from Egypt.
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The Petra papyri are preserved in a very fragmentary state and thus the linguistic analysis given here cannot be comprehensive. We can, however, see that a rather high (Atticist) orthography and morphology was preferred by the majority of... more
The Petra papyri are preserved in a very fragmentary state and thus the linguistic analysis given here cannot be comprehensive. We can, however, see that a rather high (Atticist) orthography and morphology was preferred by the majority of writers. This overview will consider phonological, morphological, and syntactic aspects of Greek, the main language of the dossier.
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This article provides a new reading of a notarial signature in papyrus BGU III 997, a copy of an agoranomic sale from the Ptolemaic period. The signature was not transcribed in the original edition since only traces of it survive and the... more
This article provides a new reading of a notarial signature in papyrus BGU III 997, a copy of an agoranomic sale from the Ptolemaic period. The signature was not transcribed in the original edition since only traces of it survive and the papyrus seems blank and intact at that place. A closer examination reveals that only the upper layer of the papyrus has peeled off. How, when, and why the alteration took place, remains unsolved.
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Greek documentary papyri form an important direct source for Ancient Greek. It has been exploited surprisingly little in Greek linguistics due to a lack of good tools for searching linguistic structures. This article presents a new tool... more
Greek documentary papyri form an important direct source for Ancient Greek. It has been exploited surprisingly little in Greek linguistics due to a lack of good tools for searching linguistic structures. This article presents a new tool and digital platform, “Sematia”, which enables transforming the digital texts available in TEI EpiDoc XML format to a format which can be morphologically and syntactically annotated (treebanked), and where the user can add new metadata concerning the text type, writer and handwriting of each act of writing. An important aspect in this process is to take into account the original surviving writing vs. the standardization of language and supplements made by the editors. This is performed by creating two different layers of the same text. The platform is in its early development phase. Ongoing and future developments, such as tagging linguistic variation phenomena as well as queries performed within Sematia, are discussed at the end of the article.
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A talk given in Varieties of Post-Classical and Byzantine Greek, University of Ghent, Dec 1–2, 2016. Abstract: An archive of over a hundred Greek texts (petitions, letters, accounts, and dreams) from the Serapeion in Memphis provide us... more
A talk given in Varieties of Post-Classical and Byzantine Greek, University of Ghent, Dec 1–2, 2016.
Abstract: An archive of over a hundred Greek texts (petitions, letters, accounts, and dreams) from the Serapeion in Memphis provide us with an exceptional possibility to examine the language variety of two brothers, Ptolemaios and Apollonios, the eldest and the youngest son of the soldier-settler Glaukias. The handwritings of both brothers were identified by U. Wilcken (1927) when he published these texts from the mid-2nd century BCE as one entity. The questions I am addressing in this paper, are the following: 1) Can we say that these autograph texts represent the idiolects of Apollonios and Ptolemaios? 2) How does that reflect in our interpretation of the interesting linguistic variation found in the whole archive (described in Bentein 2015)? If a text has been written by the hand of certain individual, does it necessarily follow that the language variation pattern belongs to this individual? The text types coming from the pens of Apollonios and Ptolemaios vary, but Apollonios produced more texts. For example, Ptolemaios did not write any petitions. The petitions written by Apollonios, on the other hand, are especially interesting since they are usually drafts or copies. In some cases it is very difficult to distinguish between a copy and a draft. The archive includes also several petitions written by chancery hands, showing that scribes were used in the process of producing the petitions sent to the King or a lower official. Therefore, it is worth studying in detail what kind of patterns we can discern in Apollonios’ draft petitions vs. the final petitions and compare them with his letters and accounts. I will pay attention to the patterns of legal / official language and examine if they are transferred into Apollonios’ ”idiolect”. The texts written by Ptolemaios form another point of comparison. The papyrus archive of Ptolemaios and Apollonios partakes in the discussion concerning the level of the individual vs. the speech community in studying language variation grammar (cf. Labov 2001, 33–34).
Abstract: An archive of over a hundred Greek texts (petitions, letters, accounts, and dreams) from the Serapeion in Memphis provide us with an exceptional possibility to examine the language variety of two brothers, Ptolemaios and Apollonios, the eldest and the youngest son of the soldier-settler Glaukias. The handwritings of both brothers were identified by U. Wilcken (1927) when he published these texts from the mid-2nd century BCE as one entity. The questions I am addressing in this paper, are the following: 1) Can we say that these autograph texts represent the idiolects of Apollonios and Ptolemaios? 2) How does that reflect in our interpretation of the interesting linguistic variation found in the whole archive (described in Bentein 2015)? If a text has been written by the hand of certain individual, does it necessarily follow that the language variation pattern belongs to this individual? The text types coming from the pens of Apollonios and Ptolemaios vary, but Apollonios produced more texts. For example, Ptolemaios did not write any petitions. The petitions written by Apollonios, on the other hand, are especially interesting since they are usually drafts or copies. In some cases it is very difficult to distinguish between a copy and a draft. The archive includes also several petitions written by chancery hands, showing that scribes were used in the process of producing the petitions sent to the King or a lower official. Therefore, it is worth studying in detail what kind of patterns we can discern in Apollonios’ draft petitions vs. the final petitions and compare them with his letters and accounts. I will pay attention to the patterns of legal / official language and examine if they are transferred into Apollonios’ ”idiolect”. The texts written by Ptolemaios form another point of comparison. The papyrus archive of Ptolemaios and Apollonios partakes in the discussion concerning the level of the individual vs. the speech community in studying language variation grammar (cf. Labov 2001, 33–34).
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A talk given in Slavery in Late Antiquity, XXIV Finnish Symposium on Late Antiquity, Tvärminne, 11–12 November, 2016
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[Paper presented at the 28th International Congress of Papyrology, Barcelona, August 1–6, 2016] New digital platform ”Sematia” enables preprocessing the Greek papyri, stored in DDbDP, so that the papyri can be linguistically annotated... more
[Paper presented at the 28th International Congress of Papyrology, Barcelona, August 1–6, 2016]
New digital platform ”Sematia” enables preprocessing the Greek papyri, stored in DDbDP, so that the papyri can be linguistically annotated (e.g. according to the guidelines of Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank). Preprocessing is executed in two layers which take into account a) what is preserved and was originally written in the papyrus b) the regularizations and restorations made by the editors. Annotating both layers for morphology and syntax provides us with novel ways of querying the language of the papyri. Moreover, we gather new metadata concerning the writers in the Sematia database. This will help studying the acts of writing and their relation to certain writers or authors and their linguistic fingerprint. I will present the workflow of Sematia (http://sematia.hum.helsinki.fi/) combining the presentation with a preliminary case study on the bilingual archive of the Memphis Serapeion. The texts by the katochoi in the Serapeion are interesting as regards their language and the fact that Wilcken, who published the texts collectively in UPZ I, identified the handwritings of the protagonists.
New digital platform ”Sematia” enables preprocessing the Greek papyri, stored in DDbDP, so that the papyri can be linguistically annotated (e.g. according to the guidelines of Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank). Preprocessing is executed in two layers which take into account a) what is preserved and was originally written in the papyrus b) the regularizations and restorations made by the editors. Annotating both layers for morphology and syntax provides us with novel ways of querying the language of the papyri. Moreover, we gather new metadata concerning the writers in the Sematia database. This will help studying the acts of writing and their relation to certain writers or authors and their linguistic fingerprint. I will present the workflow of Sematia (http://sematia.hum.helsinki.fi/) combining the presentation with a preliminary case study on the bilingual archive of the Memphis Serapeion. The texts by the katochoi in the Serapeion are interesting as regards their language and the fact that Wilcken, who published the texts collectively in UPZ I, identified the handwritings of the protagonists.
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Review of: Michael Gronewald, John Lundon, Klaus Maresch, Gesa Schenke, and Philipp Schmitz, Kölner Papyri (P. Köln), Band 13. Published in Bulletin of American Society of Papyrologists 53 (2016) 415–417.
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Our aim is to provide a linguistic analysis of the types of variation present in the documentary papyri. We produce analysis of e.g. Egyptian influence on the use of Greek in Egypt, and the type of variation existant in the Latin use. We... more
Our aim is to provide a linguistic analysis of the types of variation present in the documentary papyri. We produce analysis of e.g. Egyptian influence on the use of Greek in Egypt, and the type of variation existant in the Latin use. We study both macro-level variation in terms of treating Egyptian Greek as a contact variety, and micro-level in studying idiolectic language use as part of a wider tendency. We make extensive use of digital technologies in our analyses. We are annotating texts morpho-syntactically, and as a later development, we also have a phoneme-based search engine. These tools enable us to analyse larger quantities of documents in a relatively short time, providing us with knowledge of general tendencies in language variation and change.
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This poster, presented at Digital Humanities in the Nordic countries conference (17th March, 2016), introduces a new tool and digital platform, “Sematia”. It enables preprocessing the digital texts available (in papyri.info) in TEI EpiDoc... more
This poster, presented at Digital Humanities in the Nordic countries conference (17th March, 2016), introduces a new tool and digital platform, “Sematia”. It enables preprocessing the digital texts available (in papyri.info) in TEI EpiDoc XML format to a format which can be uploaded to an outside service for linguistic annotation (for morphological and syntactic treebanking). An important aspect in this process is to take into account the original surviving writing vs. the standardization of language and supplements made by the editors. This is performed by creating two different layers of the same text. In Sematia, the user can also add new metadata concerning the text type, writer and handwriting of each act of writing. The platform is in its early development phase.