Of Presbyters and Stonemasons, or Switching Codes in a Syrian Village (original) (raw)

This paper explores the concept of codeswitching in the context of Greek and Syriac inscriptions from late antique Syria, emphasizing the linguistic phenomena observed when different language codes coexist in a shared environment. By applying the sociolinguistic notion of codeswitching to seemingly unconnected monolingual inscriptions situated close to one another, the author highlights the potential for understanding the multilingual character of historical texts, thereby broadening the methodological approaches available for analyzing ancient inscriptions.