Hellenophones or barbarophones? Assessing Pamphylian intelligibility through the Levenshtein algorithm

This study investigates the intelligibility of the Pamphylian Greek dialect in the late Classical-Hellenistic era through a computational method, the normalized Levenshtein Distance (LDN) algorithm. Applying this metric for the first time to an ancient Classical language, the study compares Pamphylian with Attic-Ionic/Koine Greek to assess the degree of mutual intelligibility, situating the analysis within the debate on Greeks’ own perceptions of dialects and foreign tongues. The analysis reveals a significant phonological distance, particularly related to phonological weakening, suggesting that Pamphylian speakers would have been perceived as barbaróphonoi- foreign-tongued - by Attic-Ionic/Koine speakers, as their difference rate is comparable to that between Scandinavian languages such as Danish and Norwegian. This result highlights the potential of LDN for analyzing intelligibility among corpus languages and offers insights into the emic perception of linguistic boundaries and dialectal variation in antiquity.