Arcadocypriot Greek

Arcadocypriot Greek
Region	Arcadia, Cyprus
Era	c. 1300 – c. 200 BC
Language family	Indo-European Hellenic (disputed) Achaean Arcadocypriot Greek
Early forms	Proto-Greek Proto-Achaean Proto-Arcadocypriot
Writing system	Greek alphabet Cypriot syllabary
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Glottolog	arca1234
Distribution of Greek dialects in Greece in the classical period. Western group:   Doric proper   Northwest Doric   Achaean Doric (probably Northwest Doric) Central group:   Aeolic   Arcado-Cypriot Eastern group:   Attic   Ionic

Arcadocypriot, or southern Achaean, was an ancient Greek dialect spoken in Arcadia (the central Peloponnese) and Cyprus. Its resemblance to Mycenaean Greek, as it is known from the Linear B corpus, indicates that they are closely related to it, and belong to the same dialect group, known as Achaean.

In Cyprus the dialect was written solely using the Cypriot syllabary. The most extensive surviving text of the dialect is the Idalion Tablet. A significant literary source on the vocabulary comes from the lexicon of grammarian Hesychius (probably 5th century AD).

History

Proto-Arcadocypriot was the prevailing dialect spoken in southern Greece (including Achaea, the Argolid, Laconia, Crete, and Rhodes) at the end of the Bronze Age. The Mycenaean and Arcadocypriot dialects both belong to the Achaean group. Certain common innovations of Arcadian and Cypriot, as attested in the first millennium BC, indicate that they represent vernaculars that had slightly diverged from the Mycenaean administrative language, sometime before a migration to Cyprus, possibly during the 13th or 12th century BC. Pausanias reported:

Agapenor, the son of Ancaeus, the son of Lycurgus, who was king after Echemus, led the Arcadians to Troy. After the capture of Troy the storm that overtook the Greeks on their return home carried Agapenor and the Arcadian fleet to Cyprus, and so Agapenor became the founder of Paphos and built the Sanctuary of Aphrodite Paphia.

The establishment happened before 1100 BC. With the arrival of Dorians in the Peloponnese, a part of the population moved to Cyprus, and the rest was limited to the Arcadian mountains.

According to John T. Hooker, the preferable explanation for the general historico-linguistic picture is that:

... in the Bronze Age, at the time of the great Mycenaean expansion, a dialect of a high degree of uniformity was spoken both in Cyprus and in the Peloponnese but that at some subsequent epoch the speakers of West Greek intruded upon the Peloponnese and occupied the coastal states, but made no significant inroads into Arcadia.

Later developments

After the collapse of the Mycenaean world, communication ended, and Cypriot was differentiated from Arcadian. It was written until the 3rd century BC using the Cypriot syllabary.

Arcadocypriot kept many characteristics of Mycenaean, lost early in the development of Attic and Ionic, such as the /w/ sound (digamma).

Glossary

See also

For a list of words relating to Arcadocypriot Ancient Greek, see the Arcadocypriot Ancient Greek category of words in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Hesychius of Alexandria
• Cypriot Greek for the modern variety of Greek spoken on Cyprus