The Curious Case of the Removable Nu

 There are many dialects of Ancient Greek, and individual dialects are often assigned to different genres, presumably due to some founder effect. This literary dialect then is smoothed and standardized and thus acquires some forms not found in the original dialect. Many literary dialects mix features from more than one dialect. Tragedy generally separates the Ionic speech of the majority of the play from the stage Doric of the Chorus, but even this relatively clear separation does not prohibit the occasional intrusion of a Doric verb into the Ionic sentence. The proper dialect of an Ode is Doric and Aeolic combined. This presents a challenge to the modern student of Ancient Greek, who has trained on Attic Greek, itself not as standard as the Athenians would have you believe. And thus we come to the removable ν.

Calling this ν 'removable' is somewhat misleading, for although it disappears, it does not do so without leaving a trace. The nature of that trace is the reason for such variation among the Greek dialects in critical grammatical forms such a participles. Greek loves participles; if one wields them correctly, they increase the subtlety of Greek to a degree that would make Cato uncomfortable. The present and aorist active particles have an affix -ντ- to which the case endings are appended; but the σ of the nominative singular triggers changes which differentiate it from the oblique cases. These changes are not the same in every dialect. In general, the change involves lengthening the preceding vowel. Such is the case in Attic. In the dialect of Pindar's Odes, however, lengthening is replaced by diphthongization; thus -ανς from -αντς becomes -αις rather than Attic -ας. This phenomenon can be confusing for a student at their first encounter because it is similar to the feminine dative -αις (which is -αισι here, for reasons best dealt with elsewhere and never had a ν). These changes create a brief uphill battle for the neophyte, until they see the horror of even more radical non-configurationality.