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I don't think Homeric Greek was archaic at the time it was composed. It would have been by the time it was finally written down instead of being passed down ora

I don't think Homeric Greek was archaic at the time it was composed. It would have been by the time it was finally written down instead of being passed down orally. There is a lot of archaism in the content, though much of it is fake archaism that doesn't reflect actual history.

suddenlybananas 2mo ago
There were artificial archaisms in Homer, like the inconsistent use of the digamma. It wasn't written in normal everyday language.
- TheCoelacanth 2mo ago
  Where are you getting this information? Everything I can see puts that development well after the poems' composition around 800-700 BCE, though perhaps before they had been fully written down. If I understand correctly, it's a minority but not completely fringe opinion among historians that a major motivation for inventing the Greek alphabet in the first place may have so that they would be able to write down Homer.
  - suddenlybananas 2mo ago
    The digamma was never used in Homer's written form, but the poetic metre in some place is done such that there would be a digamma there and in some places, they don't modify the metre to adapt to the digamma.
    - TheCoelacanth 2mo ago
      There's a two-hundred year gap been it bring composed to capturing it in written form. It was in oral form and didn't written down (outside of some short fragements) for the ~200 year. When the The Odyssey was composed, widespread use of digamma sound was still a big thing. I can easily believe that anachronistic language was added in the process of writing them down, but the original audience wasn't people reading in a book; it was people who were listening to a poem that had never been written down. There is a huge amount of anacronistic content, but when it was first performed, language was relatively contemporary at the start.
      - suddenlybananas 2mo ago
        But there is inconsistent use of the digamma, in some sections it's not used!

suddenlybananas 2mo ago

There were artificial archaisms in Homer, like the inconsistent use of the digamma. It wasn't written in normal everyday language.

TheCoelacanth 2mo ago
Where are you getting this information? Everything I can see puts that development well after the poems' composition around 800-700 BCE, though perhaps before they had been fully written down. If I understand correctly, it's a minority but not completely fringe opinion among historians that a major motivation for inventing the Greek alphabet in the first place may have so that they would be able to write down Homer.
- suddenlybananas 2mo ago
  The digamma was never used in Homer's written form, but the poetic metre in some place is done such that there would be a digamma there and in some places, they don't modify the metre to adapt to the digamma.
  - TheCoelacanth 2mo ago
    There's a two-hundred year gap been it bring composed to capturing it in written form. It was in oral form and didn't written down (outside of some short fragements) for the ~200 year. When the The Odyssey was composed, widespread use of digamma sound was still a big thing. I can easily believe that anachronistic language was added in the process of writing them down, but the original audience wasn't people reading in a book; it was people who were listening to a poem that had never been written down. There is a huge amount of anacronistic content, but when it was first performed, language was relatively contemporary at the start.
    - suddenlybananas 2mo ago
      But there is inconsistent use of the digamma, in some sections it's not used!