Classical World

While the Greek documentary papyri constitute a rich resource for linguistic innovation, they cannot be considered a linguistically homogeneous corpus. In this article, I show that even in a single archive, the “katochoi of the Sarapeion” archive, considerable variation exists in terms of phonology/orthography, morphology, and syntax. I argue that the different types of documents contained in this archive—that is, dreams, letters and petitions—can be situated on a linguistic continuum or “register” continuum. To account for the linguistic differences between these documents, the so-called “tenor”-vector plays a particularly important role.