Sounds, Signs, and Boundaries

This chapter develops further an earlier argument that the differences between the local scripts of Greece cannot be accidental. It connects them with the emergence of ethnic boundaries within the Greeks. It considers the adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet to the Greek language, and then the process of creating the local scripts, largely by assigning different sound values to the same letters. It then correlates the different local 'written languages' (i.e. local combinations of scripts and dialects) with differences in material and symbolic culture. Written language turns out to have been understood as a component of regional ethnic identities.