This chapter deals with onomastic homonymy as a phenomenon of ancient Greek literary history. Focusing first on early Greek poets about whom ancient testimonies claim there were doublets (Euenus, Xenophanes, Alcman and Sappho), the chapter moves on to examine doublets of poets emerging in the Parian Chronicle (Simonides, Sosiphanes, Stesichorus, Melanippides), to conclude with the Phocian Homer of Byzantine scholarship (Tzetzes). After distinguishing between historical homonyms and scholarly constructs, the chapter examines the possible reasons behind the duplication of poets, most particularly the need to deal with conflicting details in the transmitted biographies while preserving the textual tradition.

More than half the world is bilingual or multilingual. So when growing up exposed to two (or more) languages at once, children have two systems to learn, and they must also learn when to speak each language. The choices here depend on who the addressee is, and on the setting. Exposure to the two languages may be uneven, and also vary over time, depending on who the child spends time with. Choice of language depends on common ground, on the topic, and on the language common to the child’s conversational partners. The early stages of acquisition are very similar, from perception of sounds and sound sequences to early babbling; from comprehension of words to attempts to produce them. Early vocabularies contain many doublets, freely accumulated as children learn more of each language. (This is consistent with contrast, but not with mutual exclusivity.) Language mixing tends to mirror adult usage and so varies across languages. Children attend not only to differences in the sound systems but also to structural differences of all kinds. Conversational skills develop in similar ways across languages, depending on exposure and practice, with language dominance fluctuating over one’s lifetime. Acquiring two dialects involves similar skills.