The Coming of the Greeksconsensus that Aeolic developed in eastern Thessaly, which
was—as John Chadwick proposed in an important article in
1956—a "buffer 'zone" between North and South Greek. 28
And most important for our present purposes, it is now gen-
erally agreed that this differentiation into dialects had not pro-
gressed very far by the end of the Bronze Age, when the Linear
B tablets were baked during the burning of the palaces. Spe-
cifically, it is now clear that the Ionic dialect did not exist in
1200 B.C. 29 It also appears (although on this point there is
more debate) 30 that ca. 1200 B.C. Aeolic and Doric were not
yet—or not much—differentiated. 31 Finally, there is consid-
erable agreement that ca. 1200 B.C. North and South Greek
were linguistically not very far apart: speakers of North and
South Greek were more readily intelligible to each other in the
Greece, and were not imported into Greece by speakers of a later form of
Proto-Indo-European. We must be very clear about this and not imagine,
as older generations of scholars were sometimes tempted to do, a series of
Indo-European incursions into Greece: the Greek dialects arose on the soil
of Greece." It is not surprising that linguists who have not specialized in
the Greek dialects are not well informed about recent directions in that
branch of the discipline. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, for example, still assume
("Ancient Near East," 7—8) that "by the middle of the second millennium
B.C., the Arcadian, Ionian and Aeolian dialects already existed as distinct
entities." They also suppose ("Migrations," 81 n. 16) that by the end of the
third millennium "Proto-Greek... must have been differentiated into its
basic dialect groups somewhere in Asia Minor before the Greeks migrated
to mainland Greece."
- J. Chadwick, "The Greek Dialects and Greek Pre-History,"
Greece and Rome n.s. 3 (1956): 38-50. - Cf. ibid., 44: "round about 1000 B.C. a dialect of the Arcadian
type came for a period under Doric influence; but this soon ceased, and the
dialect continued its development separately.... The Ionic invasion of
Greece is a fiction." - The argument on behalf of the thesis has been made most fully
byj. L. Garcia-Ramon, Les Origines postmyceniennes du groups dialectal eolien
(Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1975). - Risch, "Die Gliederung," 71, concluded that not a single one
of the differentia between those two dialects can with certainty be dated be-
fore ca. 1200 B.C.