Varieties of Postclassical and Byzantine Greek.

This volume collects papers from a 2016 conference bearing the same name as the title. It is divided into two sections after an overview on the classification of language varieties.

The first section deals with specific noteworthy varieties in literature, while the second focuses on particular linguistic items within a specific variety, such as tense, anteriority, phonology or syntax.  The first section contains a number of chapters on Egyptian Greek and Turkish Greek from several centuries, most of which are useful for the biblical scholar.  The second section has several chapters also useful for the biblical scholar, discussing epistolary dialogue, register, text type, and syntax.    

In the first section, one of the essays discusses “idiolect” while analyzing a small corpus of letters written between two brothers. This chapter has relevance for analyzing NT letters where issues of authorship are debated. Another essay in this section discusses politeness strategies in letters. This is helpful for NT analysis of letter components to determine whether they are affected by idiolect or by the need to be polite. A number of the essays dealt with an array of concerns over the correct way to classify the observed varieties of Greek language, and how to carefully separate them when a document presents more than one variety.

One chapter in the second section discusses the tense-form variety, and connects this to the shifting of focus within letters from the author’s perspective to the reader’s perspective. Another focuses Future and Perfect tense-forms within infinitive clauses. Several of the essays in this section attempt to explain difficulties in classifying certain phenomena, or how to separate sections of a longer text, or debate whether certain elements can be categorized or not.

Overall, this volume provides a useful resource regarding the classification of varieties of Greek, and the problems around doing so. This volume is mainly useful for those developing Greek grammars or working on projects directly involving varieties in Koine Greek.