In Search of the Last Greek Infinitive

By Dr Ioanna Sitaridou

Part of the Language, Culture and Myths series of seminars presented by The Hellenic Centre and Cambridge Centre for Greek Studies.

Romeyka, an endangered Greek variety still spoken in North-East Turkey, has maintained the infinitive, which as such does not exist in Modern Greek. Thanks to the infinitive, we created a chronology of the evolution of Proto-Pontic, to which Romeyka belongs, and identified its split from other Greek varieties as being at least 500 years earlier than previously thought namely, in Hellenistic times, rather than during the medieval period thus putting forward a new phylogeny of Asia Minor Greek.
Bookings at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-search-of-the-last-greek-infinitive-by-dr-ioanna-sitaridou-tickets-144405014285.

Ioanna Sitaridou is Reader in Spanish and Historical Linguistics; Head of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Cambridge; Deputy Director for the Cambridge Centre for Greek Studies; and Fellow at Queens’ College. She works on historical syntax and has published extensively in Lingua, Diachronica, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Glossa, etc. For her work on Old Romance she has been awarded an Early Career Fellowship by CRASSH, Cambridge (2008); a research buyout by the ISWOC project at the University of Oslo (2012); a CAPES grant at UFB in Salvador, Brazil (2020). For (re)discovering the last Greek infinitive in the Black Sea in Turkey, she was awarded the Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellowship in Hellenic Studies at Princeton (2011); a Research Fellowship at the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University (2015); and a Chaire Internationale at Labex Empirical Foundations of Linguistics, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 (2021).