PURism in Antiquity: Theories of Language in Greek Atticist Lexica and their Legacy

Project Information

PURA

Grant agreement ID: 865817

DOI

10.3030/865817

EC signature date 10 July 2020

Start date 1 January 2021

End date 31 December 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 303 437,00

EU contribution

€ 1 303 437,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITA CA' FOSCARI VENEZIA
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - PURA (PURism in Antiquity: Theories of Language in Greek Atticist Lexica and their Legacy)

Reporting period: 2024-01-01 to 2025-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

PURA studies the theories of linguistic purism of Greek Atticism and their legacy in later ages. Linguistic purism is a recurrent phenomenon in periods of societal crisis, when issues of cultural or national identity are at stake or being redefined. It responds to the anxiety that a language is decaying, dying or ‘threatened’ by other languages and multilingualism. Such attitudes are common in contemporary societies and have marked the history of European culture at several stages (Italy, Greece and Germany being some prominent examples). Yet their roots can be traced back to antiquity: an antecedent that remains mostly unknown outside Classics and that has never been studied from a multidisciplinary perspective.
PURA seeks to build a bridge between ancient and modern purist theories by producing the first diachronic study of Greek purism, the texts which upheld it, and their legacy in later ages. We have three objectives.
Our first objective is to make the theories of these intricate texts accessible outside the traditional format of critical editions and more approachable for non-experts. PURA has achieved this objective by creating the Digital Encyclopedia of Atticism (www.atticism.eu) a web-based open-access platform which collects the output of our linguistic, philological and paleographic study of Atticist lexica.
Our second objective is to comprehensively map Atticist theories. To achieve this objective PURA is performing a diachronic linguistic analysis of the lexica which studies the history and evolution of Atticist features across the whole history of the language: Ancient, Medieval and Modern Greek. This part of our work informs the lexicographical articles of the Digital Encyclopedia of Atticism and will feed the first two volumes of the project monograph: The Roots of Atticism (to appear in 2024) and The Age of Atticism (to appear in 2027).
Our third objective is to study the intellectual and cultural legacy of Atticism in the Middle Ages and early modern age. We are charting the history of the main Atticist lexica as books: from the production of manuscripts at Byzantium to their arrival in Humanist Italy down to their first circulation in print across Italy and the rest of Europe in the Renaissance. This part of our work has been published in the codicological articles of the Digital Encyclopedia of Atticism from 2024, in a series of journal articles, and will also be part of vol. 3 of the project monograph, The Legacy of Atticism (to appear in 2027).

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

So far, the work performed by PURA has developed along three complementary lines of research which have produced three kinds of outputs: our database, the project monograph, and other volumes stemming from our research. In Year 1 we created the Digital Encyclopedia of Atticism (www.atticism.eu) in collaboration with the Venice Center for Digital and Public Humanities. This database collects our analysis of lemmas from Atticist lexica, the manuscripts which transmit them, and the scholars who produced them. So far, as the result of work undertaken in Months 1–54, DEA includes 220 lexicographical articles, 55 descriptions of manuscripts, and 9 articles on scholars and their works. By the end of the project in December 2026, DEA will contain 60 further lexicographical entries, the full mapping of the manuscripts of Phrynichus’ Eclogue, and ca. 7 more entries in the section Scholars&Works. Based on the data acquired through this work, we are writing the project monograph, devoted to Atticism, its prodromes in the Classical and Hellenistic periods, and legacy in the Byzantine age. Vol. 1, The Roots of Atticism, was published in December 2024, while vol. 2 (The Age of Atticism) and 3 (The Legacy of Atticism) are expected to be published in 2027. Meanwhile, our work on two lexica – Pollux’s Onomasticon and Phrynichus’ Praeparatio sophistica – has produced two further volumes: The Textual Tradition of Pollux’s Onomasticon, by J. Cavarzeran (forthcoming autumn 2025), a reappraisal of this lexicon’s transmission in the Middle Ages, and New Approaches to Phrynichus’ Praeparatio sophistica, ed. by F. Favi, A. Pellettieri, and O. Tribulato (forthcoming autumn 2025), which stems from PURA’s second workshop (September 2022) and paves the way for a new edition of the lexicon. PURA has also hosted three visiting researchers (from Athens, Ghent, and Oxford) and PURA team members have participated in conferences and workshops in Amsterdam, Cambridge, Coimbra, Cologne, Ghent, Hamburg, Meran, Messina, Pisa, Oxford, Potenza, Thessaloniki, and Venice.
Overall, to date PURA has produced 295 publications (see the full list here: https://pric.unive.it/projects/pura/publications) and several more are forthcoming.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

PURA’s progress and expected results concern four areas.
Philological study of Greek lexicography. PURA’s cross-textual approach is enabling the study of Greek lexica and their linguistic theories in a more in-depth and organic manner than has been attempted before. By the end of PURA, we will have produced a significant number of lexicographical entries on Atticist lexica which will enable important advances in the understanding of the relationship between individual lexica and how this tradition was received in the Byzantine age. Many of these insights also feed the second part of vol. 1 of the project monograph and will be made available in vols. 2 & 3. We also expect to propose a new model for the critical edition of some of these materials.
Extrapolation of linguistic theories from lexica. PURA is mapping the contents of Atticist lexica by linguistic level (phonology, nominal and verbal morphology, word formation, syntax, the lexicon). By the end of PURA, we expect to have achieved a complete description of Attic Greek according to the Atticists. Through DEA and the project monograph we will produce the first full study of the linguistic theories of Atticism and the first to consider them under the sociolinguistic category of language purism.
The manuscript tradition. The mapping of the manuscripts of Pollux’ Onomasticon has produced significant advances, leading to a re-definition of the relations between manuscripts and their families, and making the case for a new critical edition. We have now extended this approach to Moeris lexicon and by the end of PURA we will have a full mapping also of the Eclogue. This will be the first comprehensive study of the tradition of Atticist lexicography from a cultural and historical perspective. It will open new interpretative possibilities, among which new ways to edit these works in the future.
Digital approaches to Greek lexicography. PURA has designed a research infrastructure for the annotation and commentary of Greek lexica. DEA has become a reference resource in Greek lexicography and historical linguistics. By the end of the project, DEA will host no less than 280 lexicographical entries dealing with more than 600 lemmas from Atticist lexica plus many more from Byzantine and other sources. This corpus will be fully representative of the theories and many layers of Atticism, providing a non-static, evolving reference source which may well be further implemented after the end of the project.

Participants in the 1st workshops dt.19/01/2022

2 Workshop 26/09/2022

Seminars on linguistic purism

Seminars on linguistic purism

2 Workshop programme

Participants in the 1st workshops dt.19/01/2022

1 Workshop programme 19.01.2022

5 Workshop programme 14.04.2025

3 Workshop programme 17.01.2024

4 Workshop programme 17.05.2024

Participants in the 2nd workshop 26/09/2022