Greek and Latin in contact: Roman Corinth

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The influence of English, among others, has drawn a lot of attention, since it is the lingua franca of our society. Compared to the modern situation, Latin was the lingua franca of the Roman Empire. For these reasons, even though it is well known that Greek was considered the language of culture among Romans and has had a clear influence on Latin, Latin influence on Greek deserves more attention. The aim of this research is to evaluate the Latin influence (especially morphological and syntactic) in a selection of Greek inscriptions. These works deal with crucial aspects of language contact and bilingualism between Latin and Greek in the ancient world but with a different focus than the one that I will adopt in the proposed research. They either focus on the Latin language or examine only textual material from the earlier phases of the Roman domination or different territories of the Roman empire. What is yet to be done is the analysis of morphological and syntactic features that show Latin influence on Greek in epigraphic material from the imperial period in Corinth. Based on both the findings of historical socio-linguistics and the previously mentioned studies, some of the main problems that this research aims to investigate are the following:What are the distinctive features of the texts under examination?Can it be determined if the use of Latin in the texts was conscious and intended?Are there numerous examples of single-word and/or syntactic switches from one language to the other?How do these aspects of language use in Corinth compare to usage elsewhere during the same period?Can a chronological development be observed in these findings?The study will be corpus-based. The Corinthian inscriptions written over the period under examination are found mostly in the volumes Meritt (1931) and Kent (1966), which collect the results of excavations in the city. Others are collected in volume IV of the Inscriptiones Graecae. In addition, the recent publication (2016) of the Inscriptiones Graecae IV2 (fasc. 3) made available new material produced between IV and VI AD, which makes this a timely study. The Greek inscriptions produced during the period investigated number approximately 500-600.The results of the analysis of the Corinthian inscriptions will be compared with the ones obtained from the study of other material produced in the same period, first of all epigraphic, but also papyrological and literary. The epigraphic sources will be taken for example from Athens, Patras, Olympia and from other cities belonging to different provinces of the empire, like Alexandria in Egypt, Istros, Tomis and Callatis in Moesia Inferior etc., taking into account that Corinth was not a "normal" Greek city in the Roman empire (König 2001). The approach to the study will be fundamentally interdisciplinary since the linguistic characteristics of the texts depend on the historical and social context in which they had been produced.