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Ancient Greek, in classical antiquity before the development of the Koiné (?????) as the lingua franca of Hellenism, was divided into several dialects. Likewise, Modern Greek is divided into several dialects, most of them deriving from the Koiné. Important authors for the individual dialects include Thucydides for Attic, Herodotus and Archilochos of Paros for Ionic, Alcman and Ibycus of Rhegium for Doric, Sappho and Alcaeus for Aeolic (Lesbian), Corinna of Tanagra for Boiotic. Thessalic and Arcado-Cypriot never became literary dialects and are only known from inscriptions, and to some extent by the comical parodies of Aristophanes. Epic Greek is a mixture of Aeolic, Doric and Attic-Ionic, according to Dion Chrysostomus; however, the "Doric" elements are not actually Doric but rather archaisms within Aeolic. The dialects of Classical Antiquity are grouped slightly differently by various authorities. Pamphylian is a marginal dialect of Asia Minor and is sometimes left uncategorized. Note that Mycenaean was only deciphered in 1952, and is therefore missing from the earlier schemes presented here. Greek dialects are defined as distinctive collections of linguistic features. The features individually are seldom distinctive, but are shared by different other dialects. Selection of a group is therefore to some degree arbitrary. However, the linguist defining the group usually begins from a geographic range with a center, such as Attic with center Athens.
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