Greek: A history of the language and its speakers. By Geoffrey Horrocks.

Greek is one of the most thoroughly studied languages there is, rivalling perhaps only English and Chinese in this regard, and there is an enormous scholarly literature covering all aspects of its grammar and use. Moreover, Greek itself is like a laboratory for historical linguistics, inasmuch as the recorded history of Greek spans some 3500 years, from Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age to the present day. Indeed, after roughly the 8th century BC, Greek offers a virtually unbroken documentary record that by any measure is substantial, containing texts, inscriptions, contemporary grammatical accounts, and the like, all grist for the historical linguist's mill. Scholarship on Greek has been helped somewhat, though some might argue also hindered as well, by the impression/ideology that it is one language, whether one is talking about the Greek of Homer of the 8th century BC and the world of Odysseus the legendary hero, or the Greek of 20th century AD and the world of another notable Odysseus, Nobel Prize winner Elytis. This view has meant that scholarship can simply be about " Greek " and is seemingly relevant to all stages of the language, a luxury that is not available in the same way for Latin and its later instantiations in the Romance group or Russian and its (near) predecessor, Old Church Slavonic. What has happened, however, as a result, as author Horrocks (hereafter H) notes in his Preface (p.xv), is that the unmarked sense of " Greek " has come to be Ancient Greek, so that the latter stages of the language have special descriptors, e.g. 'Modern' Greek, 'Byzantine' Greek, etc. Perhaps for this reason, the latter stages of Greek have not received the attention they might have from scholars, and there is actually a paucity of handbook-like materials on these periods. Further, there are just a few works that treat the whole of the history of the Greek language. Browning's wonderful and delightful work is overly concise, and is perhaps more a sketch than a detailed handbook, and the same can be said of Tonnet's fine book. Thumb, on the other hand, while providing a lot of historical information, really aims at a description of the modern language. For the latter, there are Meillet 1920/1965 and Palmer 1980, but they actually pay very little attention to the Medieval and Modern periods, concentrating instead on the unmarked sense of 'Greek', i.e. Ancient Greek.