Making the Case for a Linguistic Investigation of Greek Lexicography: Some Examples from the Byzantine Reception of Atticist Lemmas

Ancient lexica give us important information about linguistic evolution and its perception by native speakers. However, linguistic investigations of lexicographical material are slow to come to the forefront of Classical linguistics and even more so of Medieval Greek linguistics. This paper makes a contribution in this direction by investigating the relevance of lemmas handed down from Atticist lexicography in the linguistic context of Medieval Byzantium, where writers had to move between different registers and were often confronted with the differing usages of the two most important models: the Classics and the Scripture.