[10][11] All dialects have poetry written in them, but only Attic and Ionic have full works of prose attested.
Hesiod uses a similar dialect, and later writers imitate Homer in their epics, such as Apollonius Rhodius in Argonautica and Nonnus in Dionysiaca.
This dialect includes also the earliest Greek prose, that of Heraclitus and Ionic philosophers, Hecataeus and logographers, Herodotus, Democritus, and Hippocrates.
Thessalic (Aeolic), Northwest Doric, Arcadocypriot, and Pamphylian never became literary dialects and are only known from inscriptions, and to some extent by the comical parodies of Aristophanes and lexicographers.
Mycenaean was deciphered only in 1952 and so is missing from the earlier schemes presented here: A historical overview of how the dialects were classified in different points in time can be found in Van Rooy (2020).
For example, the word for the "god of the sea" (regardless of the culture and language from which it came) was in some prehistoric form *poseidāwōn (genitive *poseidāwonos).
Homeric Greek shows the Ionic rather than the Attic version of the vowel shift for the most part.
Similarly, Greek inherited the series, for example, ei, oi, i, which are e-, o- and zero-grades of the diphthong respectively.
They could appear in different verb forms – present leípō (λείπω) "I leave", perfect léloipa (λέλοιπα) "I have left", aorist élipon (ἔλιπον) "I left" – or be used as the basis of dialectization: Attic deíknȳmi (δείκνῡμι) "I point out" but Cretan díknūmi (δίκνῡμι).
The ancient Greek dialects were a result of isolation and poor communication between communities living in broken terrain.
Increasing population and communication brought speakers more closely in touch and united them under the same authorities.
[33] Others include the Southern Italian dialects in this group, though perhaps they should rather be regarded as descended from the local Doric-influenced variant of the Koine.