Linguistics and Archaeologypart on Ventris's decipherment of the tablets, Risch proposed
that in the Late Helladic period there were only two Greek
dialects in Greece. In the Mycenaean south—central Greece,
the Peloponnese, and Crete—there was South Greek (Risch's
South Greek was the same as Porzig's East Greek; because it
was spoken in the southern part of LH Greece, South Greek
seems the more appropriate name). The Bronze Age Greeks
living north and west of Boeotia spoke a more conservative
North Greek dialect. After the Bronze Age ended, Risch
showed, Ionic emerged when South Greek speakers came under
the influence of North Greek speakers (South Greek survived
in a purer form in Arcado-Cypriote). Aeolic, on the same ar-
gument, arose from reversed circumstances: some time after
1200 B.C. (the date of the last Linear B tablets), a North Greek
substrate was overlaid by a South Greek superstrate (Doric and
Northwest Greek preserved more faithfully the North Greek
dialect of the Bronze Age). Thus all the dialects of historical
times came about through the differentiation and recombina-
tion of two prehistoric dialects. And where had these two dia-
lects—North and South Greek—come from? They had, ac-
cording to Risch, emerged from Common Greek, or Proto-
Greek. Their differences were not the result of the passage of
time, but of geography. The Greek dialects had arisen in
Greece. From an original Proto-Greek, the several dialects de-
veloped as the language spread over a geographical area too
large and politically divided to be linguistically unified.
The explanation of the Greek dialects as geographical devia-
tions from Proto-Greek is now accepted by most students of
the Greek dialects (some linguists further afield, however, have
thus far ignored it). 27 Among specialists there is now a rough
Sicht," MH 12 (1955): 61-75. Risch had first advocated the geographical
approach to dialect-analysis in "Altgriechische Dialektgeographie?" MH 6
(1949): 19-28.
- The insiders' view has been forcefully stated by Wyatt in "The
Prehistory of the Greek Dialects," 558: "We must assume that whatever
dialectal variations were to be found within it arose within it, that is, in
39