Last week I attended the ninth International Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics at the University of Helsinki.

It was an excellent conference with a lot of good linguistic and philological content featuring some nice quantatitive analyses.

Some of the paper highlights for me:

  • Paul Kiparsky on a regular sound change explanation (via Optimality Theory) for various alternations usually explained via analogy
    abstract
  • Robert Crellin on the ambiguity of Greek without vowels as part of an exploration of why Greek introduced written vowels in the first place
    abstract
  • Lucien van Beek on atelic perfects in Homeric Greek
    abstract
  • David Goldstein on differential agent marking (dative vs prepositional phrase) in Herodotus
    abstract
  • Sandra Rodríguez Piedrabuena on (im)politeness strategies in Ancient Greek
    abstract

I may do individual follow-up posts to some of these as they inspired potential investigations of my own in the future.

It was also great just catching up with people I’ve met the last couple of years at Greek and Indo-European conferences at UCLA, Oxford, and Cambridge.