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Greek and Phrygian probably interacted over a period of several thousand years. Isoglosses linking the two languages presuppose a close genetic relationship in prehistoric times. Contacts between the two languages must have been maintained, whether or not continuously, until the end of the second millennium, by which time the Phrygians were to be found in Macedonia and Thrace. The Macedonian invasion inevitably intensified interactions between the two languages, bringing them to an unprecedented level, but also changing their character. This chapter examines how Phrygian survived, at least in written form, until the middle of the third century AD.

Languages are traditionally subdivided into geographically distinct dialects, although any such division is just a coarse approximation of a more fine-grained variation. This underlying variation is usually visualised in the form of maps, where the distribution of various features is shown as isoglosses. Component models such as factor analysis can be used to analyse spatial distributions of a large number of different features — such as the isogloss data in a dialect atlas or the distributions of ethnological or archaeological phenomena — with the goal of finding dialects or similar cultural aggregates. However, there are several such methods, and it is not obvious how their differences affect their usability for computational dialectology. This chapter addresses this question by comparing five such methods (factor analysis, non-negative matrix factorisation, aspect Bernoulli, independent component analysis, and principal components analysis) with two data sets describing Finnish dialectal variation. There are some fundamental differences between these methods, and some of these have implications that affect the dialectological interpretation of the results.

As a partial complement to the survey of grammatical forms in chapter 11, this chapter examines a corpus of 360 nouns in Dyirbal. It investigates whether, for a given meaning, there is a single form across all dialects, or two, or more, and also whether there are cognates in neighbouring languages. The final section of the chapter focuses on the varying meanings of a number of lexical forms. It can be instructive to compare the meanings of a single lexeme across the dialects of Dyirbal, and in surrounding languages. The chapter examines the various meanings of malan: ‘flat rock’, ‘main river’, ‘coast country’. ‘sandbank’, ‘back water’. And the similarities are examined between terms for ‘cloud’, ‘sky’, and ‘rain’, terms for stars, and terms for ‘fish (generic)’, ‘black bream’ and ‘ground’.

This chapter focuses on the diachronic and synchronic relation between language and space, critically considering some of the most important advances made within Romance linguistic geography and dialectometry. It reviews the early work of the dialect geographers in recording regional variation by means of detailed linguistic atlases and in tracing dialect areas, while reflecting upon the linguistic nature of the major discontinuities and their historical significance in explaining the fragmentation of Latin. The second part of the chapter concentrates on more recent taxometric and cartographic achievements of dialectometry in its quantitative investigations and interpretations of traditional linguistic atlases, exploring the non-coincidence of single areas and their surrounding isoglosses; difficulties in measuring the data of linguistic atlases; integration of quantitative methods with traditional qualitative geolinguistics; discovery of lower and higher ranking structural patterns concealed in traditional presentations of atlas data; and cartographic exploitation of similarity and distance matrices.