This study is the result of a compilation and interpretation of data that derive from Classical studies, but are studied and analyzed using computational linguistics, Treebank annotation, and the development and post-processing of metrics. More specifically, the purpose of this work is to employ computational methods so as to analyze a particular form of Ancient Greek language that is Attic Greek, “measure” its attributes, and explore the socio-political connotations that its usage had in the era of the High Roman Empire.
During the first centuries CE, the landscape of the Roman Empire is polyvalent. It consists of native Romans who can be fluent in Latin and Greek, Greeks who are Roman citizens, other easterners who are potentially trilingual and have also assumed Roman citizenship, and even Christians, who identify themselves as Roman citizens but with a different religious identity. It comes as no surprise that language is politicized, and identity, both individual and civic, is constantly reshaped through it. The question I attempt to answer is whether we can quantify Greekness of native and bilingual speakers based on an analytic computational study of Attic dialect.
Chapter 1 provides a discussion of the three aforementioned scholarly fields, which were pertinent for the study. I present the precepts of computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, and digital humanities so as to further explicate what prompts this work and how the confluence of three methodologies significantly enhances our apprehension of the issue at hand.
In Chapter 2, I approach Greekness, Latinity, and Atticism through the writings of Greek and Roman grammarians and lexicographers and provide the complete list of all the occurrences of the aforementioned notions.
Chapters 3 and 4 explicate further the reasoning behind the usage of the Perseids framework and the Prague annotation system. They then proceed to relate the metrics developed, the computational methods, and their subsequent visualization to quantify and objectify the previously purely theoretical inferences. The metric system was developed after careful consideration of the stylistic attributes of Ancient Greek. Therefore, each metric “measures” something pertinent in the formation of the language. The visualizations then afford us a more understandable and interpretable format of the numerical results. For philologists, it is interesting to view the graphic presentation of humanistic ideas, and for the computer scientists the applicability of their methods on a topic that is predominantly philological and social.
Finally, chapter 5 recontextualizes the numerical results and their interpretations, as were acquired in chapters 3 and 4, and thus sets the parameters necessary to discuss them in conjunction with readings of literary texts of the period of the High Empire. My intention is to show how numbers are “translated” into a different “language,” the language of the humanist.:Acknowledgments Page 6
Chapter 1: Introduction Page 7
1.1 Focus of the Study Page 7
1.2 Classical Studies and Digital Humanities Page 9
1.3 Corpus Linguistics Page 13
1.4 Humanities Corpus and Corpus Linguistics Page 15
1.5 Synopsis of the Project Page 17
Chapter 2: Linguistic Purity as Ethnic and Educational Marker, or Greek and
Roman Grammarians on Greek and Latin. Page 22
2.1 Introduction Page 22
2.2 Grammatical and Lexicographic Definitions Page 23
2.2.1 Greek and Latin languages Page 23
2.2.2 Grammatici Graeci Page 29
2.2.3 Grammatici Latini. Page 32
2.3 Greek and Attic in Greek Lexicographers Page 48
2.4 Conclusion Page 57
Chapter 3: Attic Oratory and its Imperial Revival: Quantifying Theory and
Practice Page 58
3.1 Introduction Page 58
3.2 Atticism: Definition and Redefinitions Page 59
3.3 Significance of Enhanced Linguistic and Computational Analysis of
Atticism Page 65
3.3.1 The Perseids Project, the Prague Mark-up Language, and Dependency
Grammar Page 67
3.4 Evaluating Atticism Page 70
3.4.1 Dionysius’s of Halicarnassus Theoretical Framework Page 73
3.5 Methods: Computational Quantification of Rhetorical Styles Page 82
3.5.1 The Perseids 1.5 ALDT Schema Page 84
3.5.2 Node-based Sentence Metrics Page 93
3.5.3 Computer Implementation Page 104
3.6 Conclusion Page 108
Chapter 4: Experimental results, Analysis, and Topological Haar Wavelets
Page 110
4.1 Introduction Page 110
4.2 Experimental Results Page 111
4.3 Data Visualization Page 117
4. 4 Topological Metric Wavelets for Syntactical Quantification Page 153
4.4.1 Wavelets Page 154
4.4.2 Topological Metrics using Wavelets Page 155
4.4.3 Experimental Results Page 157
4.5 Conclusion Page 162
Chapter 5: «Γαλάτης ὢν ἑλληνίζειν»: Greekness, Latinity, and Otherness in the
World of the High Empire. Page 163
5.1 Introduction Page 163
5.2 The Multiethnical Constituents of an Imperial Citizen: Anacharsis,
Favorinus, and Dionysius’s of Halicarnassus Ethnography. Page 165
5.3 Conclusion Page 185
Chapter 6: Conclusion Page 187
References Page 190
Appendix Page 203
Curriculum Vitae Page 212
Dissertation related Publications Page 225
Selbständigkeitserklärung Page 22
