Greek Dialogues - Cappadocian and the other Modern Greek Dialects

Date and Time: Thursday, 9th May, 2024 at 18:00h GMT

Venue: Room GR05, Faculty of English, West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DP

For May, we welcome back Professor Mark Janse (Ghent University) to deliver a Greek Dialogues seminar analysing the development of modern Greek varieties.

Cappadocian belongs to the East Asia Minor Greek dialect group, together with Pontic and Pharasiot. They are among the most divergent dialects of Modern Greek due to their particular history and their contact with other languages, especially Turkish. They are characterized by a number of shared retentions as well as a number of shared innovations which are not found in other Modern Greek dialects. The focus of this dialogue will be on Cappadocian, but reference will be made to Pontic and Pharasiot as well.

Although Cappadocian is sometimes considered to be “a form of idiomatic Medieval Greek”, most of the retentions in it can actually be traced back to the Hellenistic and Roman periods, when a distinctive variety of Koine Greek developed. Many archaisms in the nominal, pronominal and verbal morphology date back to the Asia Minor (also called Anatolian) Koine. There is, however, an even older Greek layer in East Asia Minor Greek, the so-called Ionic substrate, which dates back to the Milesian colonization of the Pontic Black Sea coast in the 8th and 7th centuries and the foundation of Milesian and Ephesian emporia in Cappadocia.

At the same time, several innovations in the nominal and verbal morphology can also be traced back to the Asia Minor Koine. The question of whether they are contact-induced or not cannot always be answered unambiguously, but there are traces of an Anatolian, more prescisely Luwian, substrate in Cappadocian. The most obvious contact-induced innovations involve Turkish as the dominant language in Cappadocian from the 12th century onwards.

All of this and more will be the subject of this CCGS dialogue, with ample illustrations.