Kinship in ancient Greek: a study of terms for "son-in-law", "brother-in-law" and "father-in-law"

Abstract

Two affinal kinship terms in the Greek language, gambrós (originally “daughter’s husband” and “sister’s husband”) and pentherós (originally “wife’s father”), present difficulties in their semantics. The discussion about their antecedents in Proto-Indo-European is still open and, internally to Greek, these terms show a great variety of meaning in the Archaic and Classical periods. In light of that, this article seeks to describe the history of their semantic evolution from the 8^th to the 4^th century BC, as well as to indicate factors that could have influenced this development. After discussing how these terms evolved from Proto-Indo-European to Greek and after examining all of their occurrences in the Archaic and Classical periods in order to identify ego and referent in each case, the final result is a more accurate systematization of gambrós’ and pentherós’ meanings, taking into account diachrony, authors and literary genres. This systematization points to different diachronic evolutions, which lead to variations inside the same synchronies.