Co-occurrence of Graphic Variants and Coexistence of Phonological Correspondences of Front Unrounded Vowels in Greek Documentary Papyri

The phonological changes of Postclassical Greek, of special significance in the vowel system, are usually described as occurring consecutively, but the spellings that document them appear simultaneously in the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods. This situation would point to a gradual development of these phonological changes, reflected in the chronological coexistence of different phonological correspondences for a single grapheme, or the use of different graphemes for a single phoneme, as well as in considerable orthographic and linguistic variation, displayed by the co-occurrence of orthographic variants within the same periods. In the case of the front unrounded vowels, there are even chronological co-occurrences of seemingly “contradictory” graphic variants, e.g. η instead of ι and η instead of ϵ. However, these “contradictory” variants rarely co-occur in the same text. We can deduce that there were different standards among scribes, as well as significant differences between the level of standardization in Postclassical Greek and that in Classical and Modern Greek.