Eventlist

Presenter: Dr Ioanna Sitaridou

Language of Presentation: English | Some knowledge of Greek recommended.

Synopsis

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.

Bio

Dr 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 of Queens’ College, Cambridge. 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); and 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).

HOW TO PARTICIPATE

In order to keep everyone safe we have organized this seminar to be delivered online. However, we are well aware that for some, a large part of the appeal of our seminars is the very active audience participation. Therefore we are providing two ways for you to enjoy the seminar:

If you want to actively participate and ask questions at the end of the seminar you will need to join us through a Zoom Webinar - for which you'll need to pre-register by following this link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/4316005990808/WN_HgAl75TGSt62Uz-kqm9TNQ

If you prefer to sit back and enjoy the show, just join us through our Facebook page or our YouTube page where we'll be live streaming the event.

Sponsors

We thank the Pontian Community of Melbourne & Victoria for donating towards this seminar.

During the course of the year considerable expenses are incurred in staging the seminars. In order to mitigate these costs individuals or organisations are invited to donate against a lecture of their choice.

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* R.M.L.G.: Recommended Minimum Level of Greek in order to enjoy this Event, on a scale of 0 to 5.