Learning Greek in Constantinople, 1290s-1360s: The Evidence of the Moschopulean Manuscripts in Athens,  lecture by Andrea Massimo Cuomo (Austrian Academy of Sciences), Österreichisches Archäologisches Institut, Athens, June 21, 2018, 6:00–7:00 pm

For the past three decades, historical sociolinguistics has come to profile itself as an exciting new field of study. Researchers working in this paradigm attempt to describe language use as a social phenomenon, investigating dialectical relationships between language and society. Contemporary sociolinguistic insights form the basis for these descriptions, but given the complexity of the subject, a interdisciplinary approach has been in the making, combining insights from corpus linguistics, historical linguistics, philology, and semiotics.

By presenting case studies, taken from late Byzantine grammars preserved in the libraries of Athens, this talk will focus on the value of then-current language descriptions: They help us to retrieve the original users’ linguistic and cultural competencies, leading to a new poetics, a speech-community oriented understanding of Medieval Greek texts.

Andrea Massimo Cuomo has worked as a PostDoc researcher at the Division of Byzantine Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna since 2012. His main areas of research include classical education in Palaeologan Byzantium, historical sociolinguistics, and late Byzantine scholia on Sophocles.