Stephen Colvin

Biographic Data

ID5628171
NAMEStephen Colvin
GIVEN NAMESStephen
FAMILY NAMEColvin
SIGNATURECOLVIN S
AFFILIATIONSUniversity College London
ORCID0000-0002-6551-0613
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS7
TOTAL CITATIONS0
WORKS AS AUTHOR7
WORKS AS EDITOR0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1995
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX0

  • Koine dialect

    Open AccessStephen ColvinCHAPTERThe Encyclopedia of Ancient History2026

    The koine or “common dialect” was the standardised Greek language which emerged in the Late Classical and Early Hellenistic periods, based on the dialect of Attica but expanded by contact with the closely‐related Ionic dialects. It was the first common Greek language, and gradually replaced the classical dialects in the written record. The koine remained the standard form of written Greek until the end of Late Antiquity, in spite of an abortive a…

  • Varieties of Greek

    Open AccessStephen ColvinARTICLEThe Classical Quarterly2020References: 18

    Social magic always manages to produce discontinuity out of continuity. Social dialect, which can be defined negatively as dialect associated with variables other than geographic region, was hardly recognized as a linguistic category until the twentieth century. Although it has been recognized since antiquity that groups at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder speak differently from the elite, non-elite idioms did not merit serious investigati…

  • Koine dialect

    Open AccessStephen ColvinCHAPTERThe Encyclopedia of Ancient History2012

    The term koine comes from the Greek phrase hē koinē dialektos “the common dialect,” and refers to the language spoken across the Greek‐speaking world from Alexander the Great to Late Antiquity. Prior to this, there was no “standard” Greek language; each political unit in Greece used its own dialect and (if it wrote) its own alphabet. The Greeks themselves grouped their dialects into three main families (Attic‐Ionic, Doric, and Aeolic), which corr…

  • Greek Dialects in the Archaic and Classical Ages

    Open AccessStephen ColvinOTHERA Companion to the Ancient Greek…2010

  • A Historical Greek Reader

    Stephen ColvinBOOKA Historical Greek Reader2007

    "A Historical Greek Reader provides an introduction to the history of the ancient Greek language by means of a series of texts with linguistic commentary, cross-referenced to each other and to a reference grammar at the front. It offers a selection of epigraphic and literary texts from the Mycenaean period (roughly the fourteenth century BC) to the koine (the latest text dates to the second century AD), and includes a wide range of Greek dialect …

  • Dialect in Aristophanes and the Politics of Language in Ancient Greek Literature

    Stephen ColvinBOOKDialect in Aristophanes1999

    Did the Greeks find it amusing, irritating or threatening when they heard another Greek speaking in a different dialect? Were they rude or tolerant when they heard Persians or Scythians speaking fractured Greek? And what about low-class varieties of the Greek spoken in the docks of Piraeus? Our evidence for the sociolinguistic culture of the ancient world is sadly limited, and modern linguistic assumptions and prejudices are often unconsciously p…

  • (Aristophanes Dialect and Textual Criticism*)

    Stephen ColvinARTICLEMnemosyne1995

    L'A. expose la difficulte d'etablir les textes d'Aristophane, le traducteur etant confronte a deux problemes: les differentes lectures permises par differents manuscrits d'un meme passage, et l'usage de dialectes, en particulier dans les pieces «Les Acharniens» (Megarien et Boetien) et «Lysistrata» (Laconien). L'A. commente l'utilisation a certains points specifiques de ces dialectes, puis explique rapidement comment il procede pour etablir un te…