1. Hellenistic Greek Defined
The definition given in a former edition of this
work of Hellenistic Greek as " the prevailing
designation of that mode. of speech in
use among those Jews who lived among
the Greeks, or that peculiar form of the
Greek language which it took in the
though'V and mouth of the Semitic
Orient when the two
spheres of life began to act
upon each other," is not only " narrow and historically insufficient " but no longer historically possible.
Knowledge of this idiom is no longer gained chiefly
from Jewish works, there being now accessible a rich
fund of sources in inscriptions and papyri from
many lands, and it is of such a character that it
bespeaks the interest not only of the philologist,
but of him who is engaged in the study of culture
and of religious history. Hellenistic Greek can no
longer be isolated as a "sacred tongue,, or as
"Biblical Greek," conceptions mediated on the
one side by religious dogmatics, and on the other
side by a dogmatic philology, the
latter of which
played with the catchwords "classical Greek" and
" vulgar " or " common Greek," and so prevented
the perception of the historical fact of the spread
of a language to wider usage and of its consequent
development. For an impartial method of viewing
the subject from a historical-linguistic point of view
Hellenistic Greek must be defined as the worldspeech of the times of the Diadochoi and the emperors. If all Greek is divided into "ancient,"
" middle and late," and " new " Greek, Hellenistic
Greek is in general identical with "middle and late"
Greek, used between 300
B.c.
and 800
A.D.;
i.e., it
begins with Alexander's conquests and closes with
the establishment of a national Greek State, the
Byzantine empire. Various designations have been
used for the language thus defined: Hellenistic
Greek, Greek world-speech, middle or late Greek,
and koing ("common"). The most used is the
last,
koing,
employed alone as a noun, though with
no general agreement as to its exact meaning.
Some understood by it postclassic literature
with the exception of Atticizing works (so WinerSchmiedel). Hatzidakis meant by it the whole
development of common Greek, oral and written,
between the limits assigned above, 300 B.c.-600
A.D.
With this Schweizer practically agrees, excluding
only the Atticizing works. The varying usage to
which the term
koinis
has been subjected makes it
advisable to retain the term Hellenistic Greek for
the language as defined above.
In historical investigations of the language two
tendencies are observable. One emphasizes the
Attic as the real basis of Hellenistic Greek, the other
minimizes its influence. This is due to the fact
that
investigators have laid stress upon only one of two
sets of sources; they have looked exclusively either
upon books, such as the works of Polybius, or have
directed their attention to inscriptions and papyri
alone and have forgotten or not recognized that
these were two sides of a common possession. It is
to be observed with Schweizer and with Kretschmer
(Wochenschrift für klassische Philologie
