Arcadocypriot, or southern Achaean, was an ancient Greek dialect spoken in Arcadia in the central Peloponnese and in Cyprus. Its resemblance to Mycenaean Greek, as it is known from the Linear B corpus, indicates that they are closely related to it, and belong to the same dialect group, known as Achaean. In Cyprus the dialect was written using solely the Cypriot syllabary. The most extensive surviving text of the dialect is the Idalion Tablet. A significant literary source on the vocabulary comes from the lexicon of 5th century AD grammarian Hesychius.

History

The prevailing dialect spoken in southern Greece (including Achaea, the Argolid, Laconia, Crete, and Rhodes) at the end of the Bronze Age, was Proto-Arcado-Cypriot. The Mycenaean and Arcado-Cypriot dialects belong to the same group, known as Achaean. Certain common innovations of Arcadian and Cypriot, as attested in the first millennium BC, indicate that they represent vernaculars that had slightly diverged from the Mycenaean administrative language, sometime before a migration to Cyprus; possibly during the 13th or 12th century BC. Pausanias reported: The establishment happened before 1100 BC. With the arrival of Dorians in the Peloponnese, a part of the population moved to Cyprus, and the rest was limited to the Arcadian mountains. According to John T Hooker, the preferable explanation for the general historico-linguistic picture is that in the Bronze Age, at the time of the great Mycenaean expansion, a dialect of a high degree of uniformity was spoken both in Cyprus and in the Peloponnese but that at some subsequent epoch the speakers of West Greek intruded upon the Peloponnese and occupied the coastal states, but made no significant inroads into Arcadia.

Later developments

After the collapse of the Mycenaean world, communication ended, and Cypriot was differentiated from Arcadian. It was written until the 3rd century BC using the Cypriot syllabary. Tsan was a letter in use only in Arcadia until around the 6th century BC. Arcadocypriot kept many characteristics of Mycenaean, early lost in Attic and Ionic, such as the sound (digamma).

Glossary

Arcadian

Cypriot

Paphian