The Language of Byzantine Poetry: New Words, Alternative Forms, and “Mixed Language”

Abstract

In this chapter the complex relationship between verse and language is explored. Verse imposes certain constraints on language, which in turn adjusts to the pressure exerted on it. One product of this fruitful tension is new words, frequently created solely for the sake of a specific poem. A special stylistic device is new words filling an entire half-line. The accumulation of such words often marks passages of particular significance. Alternative forms, existent also in non-poetical language, develop a particular functionality in verse, since they provide the poet with comfortable alternatives in terms of accentual patterns, number of syllables, and/or prosody. Occasionally, linguistic registers, which in principle are clearly distinguished, are mixed with each other for metrical or stylistic reasons. In early vernacular poetry, this mixture, particularly of various morphological registers, is much more the rule than the exception. Finally, the symbiosis of learned and vernacular is underlined through vernacular titles of learned poems.