The Romeyka infinitive

Abstract

One Pontic Greek variety, Romeyka of Of, Turkey, today preserves a robust infinitive usage. Comparing the current infinitival distribution in Romeyka with previous stages of Greek, I argue that: (a) the Romeyka infinitive has roots in Ancient Greek due to preservation of the constructionprin“before” with infinitive, which remains extremely productive, but which did not survive in other varieties into early medieval times and is only found as a learned construction in ‘high’ registers of the Medieval Greek record; (b) neither the survival of the plain and personal infinitive, nor the emergence of the inflected one can be due to contact with Turkish; (c) the Romeyka infinitive, part of a conservative medieval variety with Hellenistic features, once cut off from other medieval varieties (as early as the 11th c. ce and as late as the 16th c. ce), was reanalyzed as a negative polarity item. Such reanalysis feeds into the discussion that NPIs belong to various syntactic categories, such as nominal NPIs, NPI adverbs, NPI verbs, NPI focus particles, minimizers and now an infinitive, too.

Toad zoonyms mirror the linguistic and demographic history of Greece

“…This is because the zoonym φουρνόν may be a linguistic "fossil" from earlier times, possibly tracing back to an Ionian substratum, which may have passed into the local Hellenistic koine, and later into the Medieval Pontic common, the ancestor of modern Pontic. This finding is consistent with previous phylogenetic hypotheses regarding the evolution of Pontic Greek [ 51 , 94 ]. The same applies to the descendants of the term φρῦνος in Andros and Euboea ( φουρνός - φουρνία - φουρνιά ), which were preserved in all subsequent phases where these dialectal varieties were absorbed by a Medieval Greek koine [ 96 ] ( Fig 3 ).…”

“…The presence of the term φουρνόν in Romeyka, i.e. the dialectal varieties of Muslim Pontic speakers, which exhibit surviving archaic elements compared to the Pontic dialectal varieties of Christians [ 51 ], is of exceptional importance. This is because the zoonym φουρνόν may be a linguistic "fossil" from earlier times, possibly tracing back to an Ionian substratum, which may have passed into the local Hellenistic koine, and later into the Medieval Pontic common, the ancestor of modern Pontic.…”

The Asia Minor Greek Adpositional Cycle

“…As a result, all modern Asia Minor Greek dialects exhibit, on the one hand, several grammatical features that are reminiscent of earlier stages in the history of Greek, especially the Late Medieval period (1100-1500 ce according to Holton & Manolessou 2010), and, on the other, a good number of linguistic innovations that distinguish them collectively from other Modern Greek dialects. Innovations can be classified into three distinct types: (a) innovations that emerged language-internally, such as the development of inflected and personal infinitives in Pontic (Sitaridou 2007(Sitaridou , 2013(Sitaridou , 2014a(Sitaridou , 2014b; (b) innovations that were induced by contact with Turkish, such as the introduction of differential object marking in Cappadocian and Pharasiot (Janse 2004, Karatsareas 2011, Spyropoulos & Tiliopoulou 2004; and, (c) innovations that are attributed to a combination of language-internal and language-external factors, for example the loss of grammatical gender distinctions in Cappadocian, which followed the earlier development of a system of semantic gender agreement still evident in Pontic and Crimeoazovian Greek (Karatsareas 2009, 2011, 2014.…”

On the origin of inflected “non-finite” forms: the infinitive vs the supine

“…i Maria prospathise na divas-un the Maria.nom.sg try.pst.3sg to read.3pl 'Mary tried for them to read' (Terzi, 1997, p. 338) (14) pion i nevriaz-i to PRO i na plen-i to aftokinito (tu) t i whom upset.3sg the to wash.3sg the car his 'who does washing his/the car upset' (Terzi, 1997, p. 346) Romeyka presents two features which distinguish its infinitival system from that of Standard Modern Greek (Sitaridou, 2014): (i) the canonical and the personal infinitive (i.e. the infinitive that may take its own subject) have been preserved, and (ii) there emerged a novel form, the inflected infinitive (15).…”

“…(15) 'say' Singular Plural 1 ipina ipiname 2 ipines ipinete 3 ipine ipinane Sitaridou (2014) accounts for the emergence of the Romeyka inflected infinitive through the influence of the Caucasian Sprachbund on this Greek dialect.…”