Claude Brixhe (24 April 1933 – 2 March 2021) was a French linguist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Nancy in France. His research interests included ancient and modern Greek dialects, Koine Greek, the history of the

Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as ...

, and non-Greek Anatolian languages.

Koine Greek

Claude Brixhe was born on 24 April 1933 in Serrouville. In a 1993 article, Brixhe wrote about the influence of ''koine'' on the Doric dialect Cretan. He studied Cretan inscriptions from the

Hellenistic period In Classical antiquity, the Hellenistic period covers the time in Mediterranean history after Classical Greece, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the emergence of the Roman Empire, as signified by the Battle of Actium in ...

and substantiated the presence of forms that were a product of linguistic admixture, as well as those that could be attributed to ''koine''. Araceli Striano writes: "This fact highlighted something which scholars had already suspected: koine did not suddenly replace the local dialects nor did those dialects disappear abruptly. On the contrary, the process of linguistic leveling in the Greek-speaking world was rather gradual, fostering the emergence of standard local varieties with their own distinctive particularities due to the coexistence of koine and different variants of ancient Greek."

References

{{authority control 21st-century French people Scholars of Ancient Greek Nancy-Université faculty