Afternoons

Traditional historical and archaeological researchers have long thought that Ancient Greek colonies were ethnically and culturally exclusively Greek. In fact, they figured that Greek culture dominated over that of bordering nations and was immune to outside influences like neighboring non-Greek populations. But was that actually the case? The cult of goddess Hera in the Greek colony of Poseidonia, Southern Italy, offers a different perspective. Surprisingly, even religion, which is typically conservative as it defines its worshippers, showed signs of outside influence. This month Gianluca will share how he interprets offerings to the goddess Hera and excavation reports to piece together the potential dynamics of ancient Greek colonization, and to understand the role played by non-Greek populations in the life and development of “Greek” colonies.

The world’s approximately 7000 languages exhibit a dazzling range of diversity in sound, vocabulary, and grammatical structure. However, we stand to lose a great deal of this diversity as well over half of all languages are threatened with extinction by the end of this century. Many linguists are now rushing to document endangered languages while it is still possible. But how can one figure out the rules of a language without a trained teacher or a textbook? This presentation will give you the basics of linguistic fieldwork, after which you will have the opportunity to ask for more details in the Q&A session.

Andrei Dumitrescu is doing his PhD at the Doctoral Programme in Language Studies of UH; his topic is the grammar of the Meglen Vlach (also called Megleno-Romanian) language of Northern Greece and North Macedonia.