The grammaticus leidensis on the Aeolic dialect: a study in textual criticism and historical perceptual dialectology

Abstract

Scholars wanting to investigate Byzantine perceptions of Ancient Greek dialectology have to disentangle a perplexing web of mutually interrelated grammatical treatises, many of which still need a reliable edition. Further text-critical study is thus required before using these treatises as sources to reconstruct — however sketchily — the historical perceptual dialectology of Ancient Greek in Byzantine times. This paper aims to illustrate this methodological point with a line-by line textual commentary on the Aeolic section of the Grammaticus Leidensis as recently re-edited by Schoubben et al. (2023). The commentary is preceded by a brief introductory part which synthesizes the observations made in the commentary and draws conclusions of a more general kind.