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Epigraphers have to develop skills, based on painstaking study and wide experience, to fill the gaps in texts that survive only in fragments, and to assess the material's date and provenance. [...]this work has usually relied on the deep experience of a community of scholars, who gradually learn to identify the linguistic conventions of particular societies and their customary procedures (such as ratifying a decree). The authors then applied this tool to assess a group of fragmentary texts, and to produce suggestions for the restoration of missing text, as well as for provenance and date. [...]the study of the ancient world, which was initially focused almost entirely on literary texts, has expanded to engage with a wide range of sources, from shopping lists to poetry.

\"Sozomena\" means \"saved\" in Greek. The series is dedicated to the recovery and presentation of texts that have only survived from Greek or Roman antiquity thanks to extraordinary find circumstances. It is primarily concerned with papyri, thousands of which await deciphering in universities and libraries. The primary intention of the series is to edit and interpret texts, but methods of recovery and presentation will also be discussed, so that different types of books will be published: editions of texts, commentaries, monographs and collections. The main language is English, together with German and Italian.

Greek κρατύς and cognates (κράτος, κρατερός, etc.) are related to Vedic krátu- ‘resolve’ and Avestan xratu- ‘[guiding] intellect’. The cumulative phraseological evidence supports this etymological proposal: in at least ten cases, Greek personal names and phrasemes exhibiting a cognate of κρατύς (that is, κράτος and compounds with first member κρατ[α]ι-) combine with terms whose Indo-Iranian linguistic cognates are joined with Vedic krátu- and Avestan xratu-. Furthermore, Indo-Iranian expressions, in which Vedic krátu- and its compounds are referred to a god as attributes, are structurally comparable to Greek κρατὺς Ἀργεϊφόντης. Since Ἀργεϊφόντης is likely to reflect ‘shining (cf. Greek φαίνω) with whiteness/brightness (ἀργει-)’, it is possible to identify Vedic phraseological matches for the Greek formula, namely expressions in which Vedic krátu- and its derivative krátumant- combine with the notion of ‘shining widely’, Vedic ví-bhā (Vedic bhā being a linguistic congener of φαίνω). The phraseological correspondence between Vedic krátu- … agní- ‘Agni, [endowed with] resolve’, and κρατὺς Ἀργεϊφόντης ‘Argeiphontes, endowed with superior might (κράτος)’ may be added to the dossier of common phraseology which the Greek god shares with the Old Indic fire-deity.

The Greek verb ἀλέγω is an ancient poetic form, found in Homer and later poets, almost exclusively used in the negative form: οὐκ ἀλέγω (usually tanslated as “I don’t care”). The overall complex history of its meaning and formation has been taken up in fine-grain detail by Claire Le Feuvre, who suggests linking it (as well as the adjective compounds in -ηλεγής) to the group of ἄλγος / ἀλεγεινός expressing the idea of “suffering”. She explains its universally accepted meaning, “to care about, to take into account”, based on the way the Homeric text reanalysed it and made it the “consequence of a paronymic parallel” with the verb λέγω, “to say, report”. In contrast, new arguments from the onomastics and iconographic (visual) narrative tradition support the new hypothesis in favour of an authentic discursive origin of the form ἀλέγω, directly linked to the verb λέγω by the misdivision of an old expression of speech, *οὐκ ἄ[ν] λέγω / *οὐ κα λέγω. Thanks to an anthropological method concerned with (re)applying the Gallicised notion of “emique” to philological linguistics, it is possible to detect a form of linguistic apotropaism whose fossilised trace has been preserved for us by the anthroponym Oukalegon. Far from being a paragon of indifference towards the world around him, the cross-checking of philological and iconographic analyses shows him to be the representative of an ancient self-preventive speech.

In this philological study we establish and reckon with the fact that the name Carpocrates was exceedingly rare and strange in antiquity. The rarity, we argue, was due to the name being a variant spelling or (purposeful) misspelling of the Greco-Egyptian deity Harpokrates. We also show how bizarre and even comical the name would have sounded to Hellenephone audiences. Greek parents, so far as the evidence suggests, were not naming their sons Carpocrates. We further explain how both the rarity and strangeness of the name functioned as a polemical weapon in the hands of some early Christian writers.

The article discusses compound formation involving proper names from a comparative perspective. While proper names can appear within compounds in English, this is not possible in Greek. The article argues that this follows from a basic difference between English and Greek: English, but not Greek, allows phrases as non-heads of right-headed compounds. As proper names in English are referential in the absence of a determiner, due to the process of D-N merger, they can still be recognized as such within compounds. This is not possible in Greek, where proper names require the presence of a determiner to establish reference.

Identifying people by name is as old as the emergence of social life. So, since ancient times, there has been a need for any person to have a name, a need determined by a certain social requirement, namely, the need to identify people within society. At the national level, since the 19th century, there have been normative acts in Romanian legislation that expressly stipulated that any person must have a double name, composed of a first name and a surname, and, at the same time, imposes that in the civil state documents, persons be presented by first and last name – according to the Organic Regulation and the Civil Code from 1864 during the reign of Alexandru Ioan Cuza. Also, at the international level, there have been, over time, legislative provisions that established the importance of the name, as an element of identification of persons. In conclusion, the name individualizes the person both in society and in the family, bringing together the social, family, and individual interests of the person.

The author of Luke-Acts embraces the time-honored literary tradition, both Hebrew and Greek, of attaching thematic significance to the etymologies of proper names. The fact that these are sometimes false etymologies based on a homophone in a different language – e. g., the festival name Pascha = “suffering,” the place name Gaza = “treasure,” the personal name Jesus = “healer” – is in accord with the methods of this etymological practice. Luke’s false etymological association of the Hebrew name Jesus (Yeshua/Joshua – transliterated into Greek as Ἰησοῦς) with the Greek words for “healing” (ἴασις) and “to heal” (infinitive ἰῆσθαι), as bizarre as it may strike the modern philologist, serves as an implicit leitmotif that runs through the entirety of Luke-Acts (Luke 9,42; 14,3–4; 22,51; Acts 4,30; 9,34; 17,18).

A well-known problem in the historical phonology of Greek is the distribution between labial and dental reflexes of labiovelars before front vowels. In particular, the divergence between the reflexes ·k[sup]w[/sup]i > ti and ·g[sup]w[/sup]i/ ·g[sup]wh[/sup]i > ßi/фг seems strange, but on closer inspection it appears that ßi is not the only reflex of ·g[sup]w[/sup]i: examples like âİSroç 'eternal' < \"living forever\" (PIE ·g[sup]w[/sup]ih3- 'live') and the personal name AvuSroç (cf. ävußrog 'adverse, aggressive') were adduced already by Schwyzer (1939: 301). I will present further arguments for Schwyzer's reconstruction of âİSroç and propose two new instances of Si < ·gwi: prvuv0â5roç 'short-lived' and pnidroç 'without effort' (related to ßip 'force'). Finally, after reviewing the complete evidence for labiovelars before /i/ in Ionic-Attic, I propose a new phonetic account of the distribution between the two outcomes of labiovelars before front vowels.