Three quarters of our project travelled to Mainz, Germany, in February 2016 for a conference with the promising title you see above. The full programme can be found on this website.

We enjoyed our three days there immensely. Big thanks to the organisers! Everything rolled smoothly and schedule was well obeyed.

In the introductory lecture, Dariya Rafiyenko and Ilja A. Seržant led us through many features of postclassical Greek. They pointed out the ongoing need for further studies on the subject, especially of the kind where linguistic and philologic knowledge meet. They also presented the term ”doculect” to illustrate that our documentary source material can be treated as a ”lect” of its own. We had already noticed with satisfaction that many papers of the conference made use of documentary papyri and ostraca as their source material. The term ”doculect”, however, made us Finns giggle. In Finnish, docus indeed have a lect of their own, because ”doku” is a person whose main pastime is alcohol consumption. This unhappy lexical clash will not prevent us from making the best use of the term in the future (both in Finnish and in English)!

Marja presenting linguistic annotation with the Sematia tool

Our project got a good head start as Marja Vierros presented the project and the ”Sematia” platform in the first morning session with the title ”Linguistic Annotation of Greek Papyri”. The Sematia tool also received an ad hoc demonstration by Marja the following day at the end of a long lunch break.

On the first day we also heard two talks on dative replacement, the other by Joanne Stolk, our partner from the University of Oslo who will also visit us soon in Helsinki (stay tuned!).

Sonja presenting her work

Sonja Dahlgren and Martti Leiwo presented in the afternoon session on the second day. Sonja spoke about ”Outcome of longterm language contact: towards a definition of an Egyptian Greek variant”, a topic related to her forthcoming PhD. Martti presented some new examples on ”Direct speech in Greek private letters of Roman Egypt”.

Discussion after Martti’s presentation

The conference was wrapped up by noon the following day, and we had a couple of hours to enjoy Mainz, visit the shores of Rhine and imagining Caesar building bridges before heading back to Helsinki.

Mainz houses in the old town