SCAS seminar with David Goldstein – A New Approach to the Diversification of Ancient Greek

ABSTRACT
The diversification of the ancient Greek dialects has long posed a major challenge for Greek linguistics. Core questions—how the dialects are related, when they diverged, and how they were distributed in the second millennium BCE—remain the subject of sustained debate, in part because of the limits of traditional methods of historical inference. Over the past two decades, however, Bayesian approaches have transformed the study of linguistic history, offering powerful new tools for addressing both longstanding problems and previously inaccessible questions. In this talk, I present Bayesian phylogenetic analyses based on a newly curated dataset of ancient Greek dialects. The results shed new light on the timing and pattern of dialect diversification, provide fresh evidence for dating their common ancestor, and contribute more broadly to ongoing discussions about methodological best practices in phylogenetic inference.

David Goldstein is the Human Past SCAS Senior Fellow 2025-26 (VT), A. Richard Diebold Jr. Professor of Indo-European Studies, Professor of Linguistics & Professor of Classics, University of California, Los Angeles