LANGUAGE VARIATION AND CHANGE IN ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL EUROPE: Old & Middle English - Old High German - Old Norse - Old Romance - Ancient Greek

Sunday, July 28, 2019

Ioanna Sitaridou 

(University of Cambridge)

In this talk I discuss the evolution of Pontic Greek within the broader context of Asia Minor Greek and in relation to the emergence of other Modern Greek dialects. Given the lack of sufficiently old textual evidence, which would normally provide clues as to the evolution of Pontic Greek, the conservative character of Romeyka, an endangered Greek variety still spoken in the area of Black Sea in Turkey, means that it can be used as a “window on the past”; thus, allowing us to create a chronology of the evolution of Proto-Pontic, to which Romeyka belongs, and identify its split from other Greek varieties as being at least 500 years earlier than previously thought, in Hellenistic times, rather than during the medieval period.