Bemerkungen zum Lesbischen dialektalen Wortschatzes

Abstract

Lesbian plays a specific role among the Greek dialects. On the one hand it is attested in a large number of epigraphical documents, on the other hand it occurs also in a literary variant, in the original lyric poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus. This poetry, written to some extent in the vernacular dialect, had much influence upon other Greek literary works, first of all upon archaic poetry, then also upon that of the Hellenistic period, then also upon Roman literature. The following paper will be devoted to the problems of Lesbian dialectal vocabulary. The main aim of such a study is to try to give a picture of the Lesbian lexicon by confronting the epigraphical data with the attested glosses, to try to point out the different levels in the vocabulary: the forms common to all Greek dialects, the specifically dialectal ones, etc. Of course, in many cases, the precise answer to the question of whether the form can or cannot be considered dialectal seems impossible. The most important thing seems to me the possible reference to the other dialects, or the history of a word, whether it occurs exclusively in inscriptions or whether it is also attested in the literature.