The Ancient Greek lexicon contains words that cannot be explained by an Indo-European origin. Many of such words can be explained as loanwords of a Pre-Greek substrate or as Semitic loanwords....Show moreThe Ancient Greek lexicon contains words that cannot be explained by an Indo-European origin. Many of such words can be explained as loanwords of a Pre-Greek substrate or as Semitic loanwords. However, some Greek words seem to originate from a Semitic language, but the morphology and phonology point towards a Pre-Greek origin. To solve this apparent discrepancy, the possibility that Semitic loanwords entered the Greek lexicon via Pre-Greek is examined in this thesis. A sample of fourteen obscure Greek words confirms this hypothesis. The words share semantical and phonological features with equivalent words in Semitic languages, but share phonological and morphological features with Pre-Greek as well. Especially the occurrence of Pre-Greek suffixes that are not present in the Semitic equivalents are strong arguments in favor of this hypothesis. Besides examples of Semitic influence on Pre-Greek, this thesis provides two possible examples of Pre-Greek loanwords in Semitic languages. These findings develop our knowledge of language contact in the Mediterranean region during the Bronze and Iron Age.Show less
Master thesis | Classics and Ancient Civilizations (MA)
open access
Current Word Order Analysis in Ancient Greek is not entirely satisfactory as it focuses on describing word order variation only in clauses, whereas in other parts of a sentence consisting of...Show moreCurrent Word Order Analysis in Ancient Greek is not entirely satisfactory as it focuses on describing word order variation only in clauses, whereas in other parts of a sentence consisting of multiple constituents there also appears variation in word order. Because of for example the occurrence of hyperbaton in these parts of the sentence, this variation seems meaningful and can possibly be described in the same terms as the variation in clauses. Therefore, in this thesis, it is proposed to apply the model not only to clauses but also to smaller segments of the text. Just like any other spoken language, the language of the messenger stories in Euripides can be segmented into Intonation Units (IU's). IU's are separated from one another by a pause or other prosodic feature such as pitch. Because of the lack of recorded data, IU-segmentation of ancient texts is in this thesis done by making use of the meter and of the syntactical segmentation criteria suggested by Scheppers (2011).Show less
