Professor Eleanor Dickey
Associate Professor
Extension: 4313
Telephone: 01392 724313
I am the departmental linguist, specializing in the history of the Latin and Greek languages (their development from Indo-European through the ancient languages we usually study to the modern Romance languages and modern Greek) and in how those languages were taught and analysed in antiquity. My work is interdisciplinary, involving both Classics and linguistics.
I grew up in the US and attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania before doing doctoral work at Oxford with Anna Morpurgo Davies. I began studying Greek at age 18; this gives me particular sympathy with students who begin languages at university. After Oxford I taught at the University of Ottawa in Canada and Columbia University in New York before coming to Exeter in 2007. I am married to Philomen Probert, another classical linguist at Wolfson College Oxford.
My dissertation (Greek Forms of Address, OUP 1996) concerns the forms of address (vocatives) one ancient Greek would use to another and attempts to answer questions such as: who used which vocatives, and to whom? What overtones did particular addresses convey? Why could men but not women be addressed as 'human being'? What extant literary works give us the closest approximation of ordinary conversational usage in this respect?
My second book (Latin Forms of Address, OUP 2002, paperback 2007) deals with similar questions in Latin -- but the answers are usually different.
My third book (Ancient Greek Scholarship, OUP 2007) concerns the dictionaries, commentaries, and grammars written by ancient Greek scholars, and the marginalia via which they come down to us. It is a textbook designed to teach anyone with a basic reading knowledge of Greek to deal with this material, so it contains not only a narrative history of ancient scholarship and where that scholarship can be found, but also a detailed explanation of its linguistic peculiarities, a glossary of grammatical terminology, and a reader containing numerous passages with commentary for translation practice.
My fourth book (Ps-Dositheus: The Colloquia I, CUP 2012) is an edition, translation, and commentary on three of the colloquia of the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana. The colloquia are an elementary Latin reader composed for ancient Greeks learning Latin during the Roman empire; they contain little dialogues on topics like how to buy food, borrow money, hold a dinner party, or have an argument. They provide a rare insight into daily life in the Roman empire but are often neglected today because they have never been translated and because even the edition of the text in the original languages is flawed and very difficult to use. I have located the best manuscripts, which had not previously been used, and produced a new edition based on a comprehensive study of the entire Hermeneumata tradition. The first half of this work is in press and I am now working on the second.
My other current projects include a study of the influence of Latin on Greek during the Roman empire, studies on linguistic politeness in antiquity (particularly words for ‘please’ in Greek and Latin), a Greek prose composition textbook, and an elementary Latin textbook incorporating reading passages from the colloquia of the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana. The Latin textbook is being tested in Latin I at Exeter; I am very grateful to all the students who have suggested improvements and hope the suggestions will keep coming!
I love research and am proud of my books, but I love teaching even more, because it enables me to pass on to others the precious gift my teachers gave me, namely knowing Latin and Greek really well. I am on leave in 2010-11 but am looking forward to teaching Latin I, Latin III, and Indo-European in 2011-12. I also teach at the JACT Greek summer school in Bryanston, where in 2010 I co-directed a student performance of Alcestis in Greek. In 2011-12 I plan to offer extra classes in elementary Latin and in Greek Prose Composition to students outside the university, in order to test two textbooks I'm developing. Anyone interested in such classes is encouraged to contact me.
