There has been a welcome renaissance in Greek and Latin studies over the past two decades, increasingly - and appropriately - predicated on the expectation that students will begin one or both languages at university. There is, therefore, a two-fold market for a book which addresses a history of Greek at an educated but non-specialist audience: undergraduates who are learning Greek and want or need some general historical background; and a new generation of university (and school) teachers who have a more sophisticated training but less linguistic background than earlier generations of teachers. The growth in interest in language and linguistics in society at large is also fuelling a demand for non-specialist books on language aimed at an intelligent lay audience: scientific work which has attracted wider general interest includes work on language and brain (Stephen Pinker,
The Language Instinct), and the social history of language (books by David Crystal, Peter Trudgill and others). In addition, social changes have prompted a public discourse about the status of dialects, regional accent, and non-standard varieties of English. Language and linguistics (‘lite’) are subjects which almost everyone has an interest in and an opinion about. In this context there should be a niche for a short book on the history of a language which most people understand to have a particularly significant place in this history of Western culture.
The book will have some text in Greek: such extracts will be transliterated and translated, and will be used more sparingly than in other books on Greek. A glance at other books currently available will show that there is no comparable product on the market. I shall make an effort to include as much social history of the language as possible, since this is a area which accurately reflects modern work in functional linguistics, and also has a natural appeal to a general audience interested in language. The book will also reflect the latest thinking on subjects such as koiné Greek and the relationship between literary and vernacular Greek. Since this is hardly available even in specialist publications at present, I hope the book will have some interest to professional classicists in spite of the lay format.
I am currently talking with Joshua Katz (Princeton) about A Brief History of Latin.
