As Director of LGPN-Ling Sophie Minon is undertaking the linguistic analysis of the circa 40,000 names borne by around 400,000 persons that are collected in the LGPN database. This involves double-checking the form in which a name is attested after the entry has been filed by the Oxford Team.
LGPN has made a major contribution to the understanding of Greek language and society, and LGPN-Ling is developing this significantly. Minon’s expertise in intralinguistic variation (ancient Greek dialects) as well as in interlinguistic variation (contact with other ancient languages), in all their diatopic (local), diachronic (temporal), diastratic (group-specific) and even diaphatic (context-specific) dimensions, enables her to correct modern readings, among other things, and even some ancient spellings and thus identify LGPN ghosts: i.e. names which never existed in the form in which they are recorded (e.g fem. Θαηΐς {Θάηϊς}, Argos, III BC); or were not personal names (Νυκτερινός, Thasos, IV BC, is in fact an adjective); or could not exist given the laws of composition and derivation that govern noun formation in ancient Greek (as [Π]ει[σ]ό-δ[ωρ]ος, Thessaly, I BC-I CE, to be probably corrected to [Π]ει[θ]ό-δ[ημ]ος).
To check the validity of an LGPN name, you just need its LGPN-Ling record.
LGPN-Ling will be made available online in January 2023.
Sophie Minon, Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Sciences Historique et Philologiques.