ERC Consolidator Grant · 2019
PURism in Antiquity: Theories of Language in Greek Atticist Lexica and their Legacy
Linguistic purism, the attempt to protect language against the ‘threat’ of multilingualism, change and outside contact, finds an antecedent in Greek Antiquity that remains mostly unknown outside Classics and has never been studied in a multidisciplinary perspective. PURA aims to overturn this state of affairs by producing the first global study of Greek purism, the texts which upheld it, and their legacy in later ages. The focus of this analysis are Atticist lexica: collections of features to be cultivated or avoided in correct Greek. These texts were compiled by scholars who lived in the multilingual Roman Empire and wished to counter the natural evolution of Greek by freezing it at an…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.