Ghent and Varieties of Greek

One of the nice sides of being an academic is travelling to nice places to meet people you only know as authors of interesting articles or books you have read. And you get to spend some days discussing with them and finding out how nice they all are.

For the two first days of December me and Martti travelled to the beautiful city of Ghent in Belgium for a conference titled Varieties of Post-Classical and Byzantine Greek. The program contained an interesting variety (hah-hah) of topics with quite broad choronological scope. Surprisingly many papers used papyri as their source material; this trend has been rising among Ancient Greek linguists recently, we are happy to note.

Martti as the plenarist

Martti as the plenarist

Our PI, Martti Leiwo, gave the first plenary lecture titled Tracking down  (-)lects in Roman Egypt. After that, we heard shorter papers on tense forms, directives, metrical and syntactic variation and lexicographers. My paper, Idiolect in focus: brothers in the Memphis Serapeion, wrapped up the first day of sitting down and listening each other in the handsome Rococo building of Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde. The evening continued more informally with reception and dinner (both very fancy, though!).

KANTL - the venue

KANTL – the venue

The second day was no less interesting. It began with Geoffrey Horrocks’ plenary lecture Byzantine literature in “classical” genres: the underlying grammatical realities and continued with papers many of which discussed text types and dialects as well as register. Lastly we heard about language of religion. In sum, very many different -lects were covered, and they obviously  need further study. In order to carry out this task, we are happy that one of the organisers, Mark Janse, reminded us about the most important -lect, the intellect!

River view in Ghent

River view in Ghent