New Linguistic Uses on the Comic Stage: Non-standard Devices

Abstract

The comic festivals became a useful platform for transferring those linguistic innovations already common in daily speech to a literary frame. This was a regular behaviour among the comediographers, while the tragic poets did it in a much more restricted way. This paper will focus on the comic attestations of the linguistic change occurred in two different dialectal areas, Attica and Sicily. The comic testimonies show a greater closeness to the common people and reflect the linguistic change better than other literary genres. Many of the analyzed features reappear either in the non-literary Koine of our papyrological records or in the usually simply elaborated Biblical Greek.