Laetae segetes IX

Studying myth is one of the most researched subjects in different scientific fields like history and anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, ethnography and psychoanalysis, philosophy and literary studies. It seems that mythology and its vital and innumerable stories are condensed of dynamics both interdisciplinary and intertextual. Studying myth, either Greek or Roman in which the speech is confined, prompts the researchers and the academics into crossing boundaries of a single science or/and of a certain period, moving from one language or literature to another. Thus, myth becomes through centuries of narrations, writings, rewritings in literature and depictions in arts, a synonym of mobility and transformation, transition and dialogue. It is rather polyphonic and adaptive in its symbolic power, capable of absorbing and diffusing all the properties of Janus (to speak in terms of mythical patterns) as well. If we focus on the metaphorical description of how myth functions in literary narration, either in prose writing or in poetry, we come across terms like adaptation, reflection, transformation, revision, and mirroring, all of which are aspects of the same notion, i.e. the protean functions of myth. These functions may be categorized into separate aspects of literary and art creation concerning the work, its creator, and its readers: the poetical, the cognitive, and the conscious. Under all these prerequisites, why do we need to study Greek and Roman myths as they evolve through centuries up to nowadays? Is mirroring, adapting or revising, for example, sufficient enough to answer convincingly to that question?

The paper presents an overview of recent language change in Modern Greek on the basis of evidence from a variety of Greek corpora, spanning more than two centuries (1800-2010), with an emphasis on developments in specific genres. The Late Modern period of Greek can now be adequately researched as reference corpora, such as the Corpus of Greek Texts (Goutsos 2010), the Diachronic Corpus of Greek of the 20th century (Goutsos et al. 2017) or the Corpus of Greek of the 19th century (Perifanos et al. forthcoming), as well as specialized corpora of Modern Greek, such as literary corpora, become available. The overall picture from the study of both lexical and grammatical elements in these corpora suggests that the development of present-day Greek has been a long-time process, overriding fluctuation that may be due to the prevailing sociolinguistic situation of diglossia. Furthermore, there is a continuum of openness to innovation in Greek genres (cf. Mair & Hundt 1999): genres including academic texts and public speeches follow strict norms and adopt conservative linguistic choices throughout the period under analysis, whereas literary genres, while adopting innovative linguistic choices, also remain stable over time, as well as across individual writers and text types like poetry and prose, suggesting a well-developed set of norms. On the other hand, text types such as newsreels and private letters are more sensitive to patterns of gradual change (Fragaki & Goutsos 2018). In this way, well-established genres seem to be less useful in exploring ongoing-change than “ephemeral” ones, which may make an appearance and then disappear over a long period of time.

Why do some inflectional forms survive across centuries, while others collapse or disappear? This talk explores the dynamic structure of Greek inflectional paradigms—a topic previously addressed in Joseph 2009, Marinis 2020, and Ralli 2000—through the lens of paradigmatic change, focusing on how morphological systems adapt, weaken, or reinforce themselves over time. Drawing on data from Modern Greek dialectal variation (part of which I collected personally), I examine how syncretism, defectiveness, and stem allomorphy interact to (re)shape inflectional paradigms.

Table 1 shows an instance of syncretism in Greko, contrasted with its counterparts in Standard Modern Greek and Ancient Greek. Building on my recent proposals regarding the distribution of syncretism (Marinis 2024), I explore why some paradigmatic cells are more resistant to collapse, while others remain consistently vulnerable.

Table 1: Comparison of the inflectional paradigm of the noun ˈliko ‘wolf’ in Greko, SMG, and Classical Greek (Marinis 2025b).

I also address the reasons why certain paradigm cells are more-or-less systematically defective (cf. Sims 2015). A key focus of the talk is anti-defectiveness, a typological pattern I recently proposed (Marinis 2025a), capturing the tendency of some elements to actively restore or reinforce previously defective paradigmatic cells. Finally, I discuss how systematic stem allomorphy interacts with both syncretism and (anti-)defectiveness, shaping the structure of inflectional paradigms.

Ultimately, the goal is to shift the perspective: from viewing paradigmatic gaps as anomalies or failures, to seeing them as key sites where morphological systems negotiate between stability and change. The Greek case offers a window into broader typological patterns of inflectional resilience, vulnerability, and regeneration.

Certainly only few would doubt that researching ancient history is possible only on the basis of a perfect understanding of the accounts in ancient sources. In spite of this, it is quite common today that in scholarly publications, besides the quotations of these accounts in original Greek or Latin, their translations into modern languages appear, that sometimes these translations are required by editors, and no longer exceptional are publications in which translations alone are quoted. Of course, these translations make the publications easier readable and can also show how their authors actually understand the accounts quoted, but at the same time a suspicion cannot be avoided that they help to legitimize the impression that research on the basis of translations is possible. In the lecture, the problems that such an impression may generate will be demonstrated on the case of the earliest non-Christian accounts of Jesus. In almost each of them pitfalls are lurking that can be overcome only by interpreting the original text of the account, and likewise almost always even the expertise in the transmission of ancient texts and textual criticism must be involved.

Texts that refer to periphrastic gradation in Latin usually contain two pieces of information. One of these is (somewhat inaccurately) based on information given by late Latin grammarians, claiming that adjectives with the suffixes -ius, -eus and -uus are phonetically incompatible with the comparative suffix -ior-, and, therefore, in their case gradation is achieved by means of the adverbs magis and maxime. However, as will be shown, this interpretation is not valid.

The second claim that appears in modern texts on Latin gradation is that periphrastic gradation – as a feature of colloquial Latin – gradually replaced morphological gradation and that the further we go in the development of the Latin language, the greater is the share of periphrastic gradation. This, after all, is consistent with a common sense view of linguistics: it is well known that morphological devices in Indo-European languages tend to be replaced by lexical ones, and it is also well known how the category of gradation developed in Romance languages. However, it will be shown that the extant literary texts (up to the 8th century AD) in fact show no such increase. At the same time, we will look at what the corpus of Latin literary texts tells us about the development of another means of gradation, the adverb plus, which eventually came to dominate in this function in much of the Romance world.

All of this, rather than providing information about the actual development of this grammatical category, is a contribution to the broad and fundamental question of Latin linguistics, namely how relevant the literary texts are as a source of data for tracing the natural development of the language, or at what period they still are or cease to be a relevant source.