Pontic infinitive, real and imagined

I too noticed the breathless article in the Independent, right after New Year's Day, on the discovery of

a Greek dialect that is remarkably close to the extinct language of ancient Greece.

The actual Independent article is not as over-the-top as the daft lead-in article, which has done the rounds through the world's press. I didn't comment on it at the time, because I was still on blog hiatus, and the over-the-top renditions I had seen made me roll my eyes. (Newspaper sensationalises science story, film at 11.) But if you read the actual article, interviewing the linguist involved (Ioanna Sitaridou), it's reasonably sober, and tells you much of what you might have already gathered over the past few decades of Greek dialectology—and indeed, from this blog :-) .

The article is talking about the Muslim speakers of Pontic, who have stayed in Turkey after the 1922 population exchanges, in the Of valley. They call their language Romeyika, which is of course Romaic, the pre-Modern name for Greek. Linguists call it Ophitic, as a subdialect of Pontic Greek.

Ophitic is indeed somewhat archaic compared to other variants of Pontic, in its infinitive, and its preservation of Ancient οὐκ ~ οὐκί /uk ~ ukí/ "not" as uç (where the rest of Pontic has 'κ' [kʰ]). You'd expect such conservatism in a geographically and culturally isolated linguistic enclave. The "closest to Ancient Greek" claim, though, is a bit much; as Nikos Sarantakos pointed out on his Magnificent Blog,

just as every mother considers her child the must beautiful in the world, so too every researcher considers their field of study and research findings to be of exceptional importance.

We know why the researcher had to highlight the conservatism of Ophitic in the press release: that's how you get funding, and Vahit Tursun, himself a Muslim Pontic-speaker now living in Greece, was quite happy to give her a pass:

For nearly twenty years we have been busying ourselves, writing and talking, yet we have not been able to convince Greeks and Greece of the existence of this culture, the danger that it will disappear, and how Greek it is. Leave Dr Sitaridou alone; maybe she can convince the English to do something about it.

Fair enough.

Still, as Prof Angeliki Ralli pointed out in the Greek press (also reproduced at Sarantakos' blog), Ophitic isn't the only survival of the infinitive: it has also persisted in Southern Italian Greek. And in both cases, as in Early Modern Greek, the infinitive is much reduced—it's still an infinitive in retreat, restricted to modal verbs. So you use the infinitive in these variants of Greek in phrases like "I want to talk" or "I can walk", but not "Better to walk than to run" or "I told her to walk".

(No, Tsakonian did not preserve the infinitive. It did however preserve the participle used as a verb complement at least up to 1930: Pernot records Costakis telling a fairy tale with the phrase (ο κούε) αρχίνιε κχαούντα "(the dog) started barking", where Modern Greek only allows "started to bark", άρχισε να γαυγίζει. And even that seems to have vanished soon after; in the texts Costakis recorded from the late '40s on, there are no such participles.)

The infinitive is still a remarkable survival for Greek dialect, and it used to be a point of pride for linguists that Pontic had an infinitive. News of the Ophitic infinitive had reached the linguistic republic from Michael Deffner's research on Pontic in 1877.

Deffner, M. 1877. Die Infinitive in den pontischen Dialekten und die zusammengesetzten Zeiten im Neugriechischen. Monatsberichte den Königlich Preussischen Akademie de Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 191-230. Berlin.

Yes, that Michael Deffner.

The problem with that claim was, the Pontic that refugees spoke in Greek had no infinitive. In 1977, this claim struck the linguist Tombaidis, himself the son of Pontic refugees: he kept reading that Pontic had infinitives, but there were no infinitives in the Pontic he spoke, or in any Pontic he'd ever heard. So Tombaidis circulated a linguistic survey among several Pontic speakers, and published his findings in:

Tombadis, D.E. 1977. L'Infinitf dans le Dialecte Grec du Pont Euxin. Balkan Studies 18: 155–174.

Tombaidis found that all but one of the speakers he surveyed didn't use an infinitive; many of them indeed completely misunderstood the examples of the infinitive he showed them from Deffner's research. Tombaidis could find no evidence of the infinitive surviving in any Pontic text or language use he had access to over the past century; and since Deffner was *that* Deffner, Tombaidis concluded that the claims of the infinitive were not to be trusted.

Greek linguists weren't particularly aware of Ophitic until Peter Mackridge reported on them in 1987, and didn't have ready access to Ophitic speakers:

(Mackridge, P. 1987. Greek-Speaking Moslems of North-East Turkey: Prolegomena to Study of the Ophitic Sub-Dialect of Pontic. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 11: 115–137.)

One of the archaisms Mackridge noted was the survival of the infinitive; so Deffner, it turns out, did not make the infinitive up. But it's just as true that Pontic as spoken in Greece does not have the infinitive; nor is it likely that the infinitive died out the minute the refugees hit the shores of Greece. Ἀρχεῖον Πόντου, The Pontic Archive was publishing texts from its establishment in 1928, six years later; and folklore journals were publishing Pontic texts from a fair while before that.

What's happened is straightforward: Christian Pontic had lost the infinitive some time after the Of valley converted to Islam (17th century, I think), but long before it was displaced to Greece and Russia. Christian Pontic had remained in some contact with the rest of the Greek-speaking world, and in any case was a much larger population, where innovations could travel.

Oh, that one speaker Tombaidis found who insisted he used the infinitive? Tombaidis can't name him; but he drops enough hints on who he was. In retrospect, it's clear why he insisted he used the infinitive too. No, he wasn't a Muslim Pontian. He was Odysseas Lampsides (1917-2006), historian specialising on Trebizond, and editor of The Pontic Archive.

Of course, you don't want to say on the record that a researcher is lying—even if the researcher is in this instance acting as a research subject. But then again, it needn't be counted as lying: people can convince themselves they do all sorts of things linguistically. That's why elicitation should not be the only tool you rely on in investigating a language. (As any syntactician has found who's tried to work out whether a sentence of English is acceptable—and then repeated the exercise with five related sentences. After a while—you just can't tell any more. ...Read more

Pontic locatives

In the last post, I said—somewhat flippantly—that the locative adverbs of Pontic are neurotic; and John Cowan asked me to spell out how.

To do so, I've gone through the 60 pp discussion of George Drettas' 1993 grammar of Pontic, Aspects pontiques. I have to say, I don't like Drettas' grammar; as a friend said to me, "it's very French". By that, I don't just mean that it's *in* French—which makes it looking through a dark glass for me; it also means that it takes an approach to grammar which I'm unfamiliar with, and its exposition is rather too leisurely, and at times woolly.

On the other hand, it has the rare benefit among grammars of Modern Greek dialects that it treats the dialect as a linguistic system in its own right, and it does not merely list the ways it differs from Standard Modern Greek—as most dialect grammars do. Some of the paths Pontic grammar has taken are quite alien to the Standard dialect; so this is well-justified for Pontic. In fact, Drettas gives his Pontic in IPA; given my readership, I'm transliterating back to Greek.

I won't resist the comparison to Modern Greek locatives either. As I said last post, Standard Modern Greek is rather limited in its means of expressing location. A couple of prepositions: από (motion from, location away from), σε (motion to, location on), and I guess μέχρι/ώς (up to). The rest is done by adverbs: μπροστά, μέσα, πάνω, πίσω "front, inside, above, behind" etc. The adverbs can be prefixed with απο- , which still means "away from" (motion or location); so βάλ' το πάνω "put it up", βάλ' το αποπάνω "put it up from = put it over, put it above".

Pontic also has a limited repertoire of spatial prepositions: σ', ας, ους, corresponding to Standard σε, από, ώς. (Etymologically ας corresponds to Ancient ἐκ ~ ἐξ, which elsewhere survived as αχ ~ οχ.) It also has a list of adverbs to supplement them, quite similar to Standard Greek. So Pontic distinguishes between άν "up" and απάν "above", and κά "down" and αφκά "below"; the latter pair corresponds to κάτω and αποκάτω, and the former to πάνω and αποπάνω. (Etymologically πάνω is itself a compound of ἐπί + ἄνω "on + up", and Pontic άν is of course merely ἄνω.) So απάν, αφκά, and απές "inside" are primitive adverbs of Pontic that already include the απο- prefix etymologically.

But beyond those etymological instances, Pontic can also prefix απο- optionally to a productive range of locative adverbs. Those locative adverbs start with words for "here" and "there".

Pontic has three words for "here" and "there", ακεί means "yonder"; αδά means "here (close to me)", and ατού means "there (not close to me, though still nearby)". By default, ατού means "close to you"; but if you're next to me, I would use αδά and not ατού. The distinction corresponds to the three-way distinction in Latin of hic, iste, ille (and I render it here as "here, there, yonder")—but not to Modern Greek εδώ and εκεί. (ατού corresponds to Modern Greek αυτού "there", but αυτού is deprecated in the Standard, and I'm not aware that it is systematically distinguished from εκεί.)

Pontic can prefix these locations with από, and so far that is just like Standard Greek: Standard Greek αποδώ, αποκεί "over here, over there; from here, from there", Pontic απαδά, απατού, απακεί.

But Pontic goes further. "Here" and "there", whether or not with a "from" prefix, can be suffixed with the adverbs for "above, below, inside, behind", απάν, αφκά, απές, οπίς. So "Go away" in Standard Greek is φύγε από δω, "leave from here". In Pontic, it is φύγον απατουπές, "leave from there inside" (από + ατού + απές). "Come up!", "He fell down", and "Look in!" are έλ αδαπάν "come here up", έρουξεν εκιαφκά "he fell yonder down", and τέρεν ατουπές "look there inside". You can use the adverbs on their own (as you would in Standard Greek), but Pontic tends to insert the location as the starting point.

What gets even harder to pin down are the four additional particles that can be added on after the adverbs; they are impossible to gloss in Standard Greek, and not much easier to gloss in French. Drettas' 15 pp discussion does not leave me much clearer about what they mean, but I gather that:

• κες means "trajectory, direction, orientation, vector"
  
• κιάν means "space, volume moved through, space apart from"
  
• κα means "this is the new reference point of the discourse; this is a specific location"
  
• κεκά means "in the vicinity of"

I'm going to give examples from Drettas', which are supposed to illustrate how this all works, though some of them leave me even more confused:

• επίεν οκςςου-κές "he went out" (in the direction of outside)
  
• εκάθουμνες οκςςο-κά "we were sitting outside" (and "outside" is now the reference point for what I say next)
  
• αδα-κές "hither"
  
• πού-κες "whither?"
  
• οψές επέρασα ασην Αθήναν κες "last night I passed through Athens" (emphasis on going through Athens, following a path)
  
• οψές επέρασα ασην Αθήναν κιαν "last night I passed through Athens" (emphasis on getting away from Athens) [hilariously, a Pontic speaker used them to show Drettas the difference between κες and κιαν—but he glosses them identically]
  
• σύρεατεν σο φουρνίν κιαν "he threw her into the oven" ("at the oven movement-through")
  
• σύρεατεν σο φουρνίν κες "he threw her towards the oven" [I made up this example, hoping I got it right]
  
• εσύ αδα-κές μαναςςέσα πώς είσαι; "how did you end up here all alone?" (the subject is not still moving, but κές means she has moved)
  
• ατείν τα εικόνας-ατουν είχαν-ατ αφκα-κές, εσκάλεζαν κ' επέγνανε, καταφύιον εποίνανε και είχανε τα εικόνας εκειαφκά "they kept their icons downwards (= hiding them under the floorboards); they kept digging, made a shelter, and kept their icons down yonder [no added particle]"
  
• ατου-κιάν "over there" (across from here)
  
• ας εκείν την ημέραν κιαν "from that day forward..." (that day is set apart from the future)
  
• ο ήλιον αφκά-κιαν 'κι στεκ "the sun won't stay down" ("down", conceived as being within the space between the earth and the heavens, that the sun can move through)
  
• θα κόφτω και τεσόν το κιφάλ θα βάλ-ατ εκε-κά "I'll chop of your head, and I'll put it yonder (in my sack)" ("yonder" relative to the here-and-now, but "here" relative to the story's context: that is the reference point)
  
• αβούτο κείτ εκε-κά και 'κ' ελέπσ-ατο "it's sitting right there and you can't see it" (it's there, but "there" is now where we're focussing attention in the discussion, as the reference point)
  
• εκαλάτςςεβαμ εκε-κά κάτ ελέγαμεν "we were speaking there, we were saying something" (the action has a reference point as its location, so it is a specific instance)
  
• ποντιακά εκαλάτςςεβαμ ε-κές "we were speaking Pontic thither" (the action has a direction rather than a reference point as its location, so it is not specific: it is interpreted as "we used to speak in Pontic in general")
  
• πού-κεκα "where exactly?" (in the vicinity of where)
  
• έτρεξεν κ' έρθεν σον α-Εάνην κεκά "he ran up to St John's church" (lit. "he ran and went to the vicinity of St John")
  
• εκατήβαν εκεί σα χοράφ-εαμουν κεκά "they came down yonder, near our fields" (lit. "to the vicinity of our fields")
  
• ασό δρανίν απαν-κεκά ετέρναν "they looked from up on the roof" (lit. "they looked from the roof, in the vicinity of above")
  
• αδα-κά, ακε-κά, σο καφούλ οπισ-κεκά "right here, right there, behind that bush" (lit. "in the vicinity of behind the bush")

The distinctions are extraordinarily subtle, and I'm not sure I've quite got them. Often enough, it seems, κες means "towards" ("hither", "passed through") and κιάν means "away from" ("from that day forward", "into the oven"). But ποντιακά εκαλάτςςεβαμ ε-κές "we were speaking Pontic thither" does not involve any motion towards, but some notion of κες as a generic location; while the sun in ο ήλιον αφκά-κιαν 'κι στεκ "the sun won't stay down" is not yet away from the horizon, κιαν merely indicates that it *will* move away. And I'm sure I'm vague on the perspective shift introduced by κα.

Now that said, none of this is that unusual from the viewpoint of human languages: there are other languages that will say things like φύγον απατουπές, "leave from there inside", or will do perspective shifts like κα does, or will distinguish between vectors and spaces like κες and κιαν do. But there's nothing particularly Indo-European about how Pontic has done it: Pontic is regaining the subtleties of Ancient Greek prepositions, but it isn't using cases and lots of prepositions to do it. And John Cowan has surely been reminded of Lojban from about the third paragraph of this post; but I'm reasonably certain Pontic hasn't picked this behaviour up from Lojban either.

As will be no surprise to anyone, this looks like influence from Caucasian languages, as Drettas concludes: the neighbouring Laz has at least 48 different preverbs indicating spatial orientation and direction. (And "Laz" is what Pontians actually called themselves before the scholars renamed them after the Black Sea.) The picture of the Laz preverbs Sylvia Kutscher sketches is absurdly rich. Pontic's locative adverbs, its "above" and "inside" and "behind", are not ultimately alien from the rest of Greek even if their combinatorics are. Laz is certainly on a much more neurotic level still; Pontic does not make distinctions like dolo- vs. mola- (pouring into the mouth of someone lying down vs. pouring into the mouth of someone standing up; the bottle is in the basket vs. the cup is in the cupboard.)

But the parameters Laz appeals to, such as orientation, shape, and horizontal vs vertical (which Setatos before Drettas had suggested to explain κες vs κιαν)—all sound like they have rubbed off on their Greek-speaking neighbours. ...Read more

TLG Updates, May 2010

The TLG has just released the latest updates to its text collection. This is what has been added, from the oldest to the most recent texts, with Early Modern Greek texts separate:

Philodemus (i BC): On Anger (ed. Indelli, 1988)

Philodemus is a Hellenistic philosopher, who we know about mainly thanks to Mt Vesuvius, carbonising Pompeii and Herculaneum and everyone in it—as well as a library full of papyri. Papyri that have made it to our day in the optimal conditions of Egypt are still more bitty and fragmentary than we'd like; and carbonised papyri are not preserved in optimal condition. Their preservation is especially suboptimal because they were first discovered and read under 18th century technology rather than 21st century—which meant scalpels rather than X-rays, and the leaves of papyrus turning to dust as they were being copied out.
There is an ongoing project to reedit Philodemus, including the papyri that were copied back then (and for which the 18th century copies are sometimes better witnesses than the modern-day remnant), and the papyri that couldn't be (and that modern technology can now get to). The major texts recently published have been On Piety and On Poems. This text, On Anger, presents a papyrus in a poorer state: something like 7,000 words' worth, some of which are even legible.

Hesychius Illustrius (vi AD): Life of Aristotle (Vita Menagiana) (ed. Düring, 1957)

Hesychius of Miletus was an historian much of whose work was lost, though his biographical dictionary has substantially contributed to the Suda. The Life of Aristotle first published by Gilles Ménage in 1663 is anonymous; Düring associated it with Hesychius.

Constantine Manasses (xii AD): Hodoiporikon (Guidebook) (ed. Horna, 1904)

An account of the historian's mission to Jerusalem and back, pursuing diplomacy through marriage between Byzantium and the crusader states. For more on the text, see Aerts, W.J. 2003. A Byzantine Traveller to one of the Crusader States. In Ciggaar, K.N. & Teule, H.G.B. (eds), East and West in the Crusader States. Peeters. 165–222.

Constantine Harmenopulus (xiv AD): Hexabiblos (ed. Heimbach, 1851)

Harmenopulus (or Armenopoulos) wrote the Hexabiblos (The Six Volumes), which was the final major compendium of Byzantine Law, which itself was a continuation of Roman Law—as witnessed by the undigested Latin expressions that pervaded it. (Yes, even more so than in English-language law.) As the final major compendium, it was much more accessible than its forebears, and has served as a starting point for many historians since. It also served as a foundation of Ottoman law—and of the civil code in the Modern Greek State until 1946.

Anonymous works on Church Music (xiv–xvi AD): Anonymous questions and answers on the interval signs (Ἀκρίβεια) (ed. Schartau, 1998)

This is a treatise on Byzantine musical notation (a topic I have already written an 11 MB PDF on), and the notation it talks about is recognisably the notation used now. The treatise includes examples of the notation as used; but like other early treatises, it isn't really a Teach Yourself manual. To this day textbooks defer on the subtler inflections of Byzantine music to the instruction of your local cantor.

Andronicus Callistus (xv AD): Monody on Unfortunate Constantinople (ed. Pertusi, 1976)

"Yet all this is gone, and now, alas, the queen has become a slave. O, how can one narrate her suffering? It was daytime, but darkness and gloom for the City, and sudden war flowed into the City from land and brine; and the Impious One throws projectiles against the walls with machines, and it falls to the ground in many places, and he rushes against the City bearing a heavy hand."

George of Trebizond (xv AD): Letter to Mehmed II on the Christian faith (ed. Pertusi, 1976)

"For these reasons have I dared write to Your Majesty concerning your eternal and wondrous glory. And you, most golden emir, do receive these letters gladly, which I have written in a simpler tongue, so that they may be more easily translated by your people into the sunlike and most bright dialect of the Turks, whose sweet-sounding and succinct words, whose boldness and virility of pronunciation is attested by all who have tasted it. For I believe that this speech translated may be of some benefit."
The circumstances of the letter are discussed in Monfasani's 1976 biography of George—with an ingenious explanation of the millenarian thinking that made George attempt to make a Christian of Mehmed (the "Impious One" of Andronicus Callistus).

Belthandros and Chrysantza (xiv AD?) (ed. Egea, 1998)

This vernacular romance (aka Velthandros and Chrysantza) has the distinction of being the only example of its kind to have its own English Wikipedia page (for now).

Libistros and Rhodamne (xiv AD?): Vatican manuscript redaction (ed. Lendari, 2007)

This is the second of three surviving redactions of this romance (and we know that there were other copies which have disappeared). Redaction α, representing most surviving manuscripts, was included in the preceding update.

Father Synadinos (xvii AD): Chronicle of Serres (ed. Odorico, 1996)

This is an important text—although I obtained it too late to use for my thesis, and therefore to get properly familiar with it. It is a vernacular chronicle of a provincial Macedonian town, and is one of the few extensive pieces of vernacular we have from the mainland at all for that time. It is also an important early witness of the dialect of Greek Macedonia. In fact the blog I've linked to—though emphatically on the Hellenic side of the fence—notes that the surnames in the Chronicle are all Greek, yet in recent history Synadinos' native village had become Slavic-speaking, so populations had kept moving during the Ottoman Empire.
The chronicle has another reason for mattering to me: the linguistic commentary to Odorico's edition was written by the late Tassos Karanastassis.

Laments on the Fall of Constantinople (xv, xix AD) (eds Pertusi, 1976; Lampros, 1908; Zoras, 1955)

The final collection in this update is of anonymous vernacular laments written about the Fall of Constantinople, taken from an edition by Pertusi; it is supplemented by two vernacular laments published by other scholars.
The laments were written within the timeframe of 1453; but the end of Rhomania kept casting a shadow over the Christians who identified with it, and it remained a topic of folk song. These folk songs were important in the nation-building of Modern Greece (as Herzfeld has analysed in Ours Once More), and every Greek schoolchild has read the song:

Σημαίνει ὁ Θιός, σημαίνει ἡ γής, σημαίνουν τὰ ἐπουράνια,
God strikes, the Earth strikes, and the Heavens strike.
Hagia Sophia strikes, the great cathedral,
with two and sixty bells, four hundred prayer blocks.

The better-read will also know the laments that were recorded in Pontic folk song:

Μὴ κλαίς, μὴ κλαίς, ἅϊ Γιάννε μου, καὶ δερνοκοπισκᾶσαι.
Ἡ Ρωμανία ’πέρασεν, ἡ Ρωμανία ’πάρθεν.
Ἡ Ρωμανία κι ἂν ’πέρασεν, ἀνθεῖ καὶ φέρει κι ἄλλο
Cry not, St John, and beat your breast not so.
Rhomania's time has passed; Rhomania's fallen.
Rhomania's passed; it buds, and bears a new one.

Τὴν Πόλην ὅνταν ὥριζεν ὁ Ἕλλην Κωσταντῖνον,
εἶχε πορτάρους δίκλωπους, ἀφέντους φοβετσάρους,
εἶχεν ἀφέντην σερασκέρ’ τὸν μέγαν Ἰωάννην.
When Constantine the Hellene ruled the City,
his lords were scared, his gatekeepers were two-faced,
and John the Mighty was his general.

Ὁ ἥλιον πάει ’ς σὴν μάνναν ἀτ’ μαυρομελανιασμένον.
Φέρει καὶ τραπεζώνει ἀτον γάλαν καὶ παξιμάτιν,
ὁ πρόσωπος ἀτ’ ’κὶ γελᾷ, ἀπολογιὰν ’κ’ ἐδῶκεν.
The Sun goes to his mother, black and blue.
She brings him milk and serves him rusks to dine on.
His face won't smile, and he gives no reply.

It turns out that Pertusi has included a selection of these folk songs in his collection. Which means the TLG now includes Pontic. (And I have to worry about morphologically analysing it.)

...Read more

Demotic in the Soviet Union

In the short-lived Springtime of the Nationalities, in the late '20s and early '30s, the Soviet Union encouraged its multitudinous constituent ethniticies to develop their languages into modern instruments of proletarian thought. Many languages were first written down in that period, and it was a freewheeling time, just as it was in art, poetry and music. The Springtime didn't last long: many of the intellectuals involved were shot in the Great Purge, many of the ethnicities involved were internally displaced as undesirables, and the primacy of Russian was reasserted. Even more than that, the primacy of Cyrillic was reasserted, and the Latin-based Turkic alphabets of the Springtime were thrown out.

Which means they're now coming back in messy ways, but that's not what I'm posting about.

The ethnic Greeks of the Soviet Union were one of the ethnicities encouraged in the Springtime, and decapitated in the Purgetime. There are two major groups of ethnic Greeks: the larger group are Pontians who migrated to Russia and the Caucasus in the 18th and 19th century.

The smaller group are the Mariupolitans, who are a fascinating enclave in the history of Greek. Their language isn't Pontic, though it has some elements in common; it is a good deal closer to the European variants of Greek. They originally lived in the Crimea, and had been there certainly since Byzantine times. (Yalta and Livadiya still have Greek names.) In fact, when the first and last fragments of Crimean Gothic were recorded in 1562, "one was a Greek speaker who knew Crimean Gothic as a second language, the other a Goth who had abandoned his native language in favour of Greek", and Busbecq's manuscript is full of Greek definite articles.

The Crimean Greeks were invited to live in the region of Azov by Catherine the Great, and moved en masse in 1778—naming one of their new villages Yalta. A portion of the population spoke a form of Crimean Tatar, which they call Urum ("Roman", i.e. Greek, because that's what they considered themselves to be.) There's an interesting sociolinguistic story with Urum as well, but I'm deferring that to a following post.

There's a third group of Greeks in the former Soviet Union, btw, though they weren't there in the Springtime: political refugees from the Greek Civil War. Reportedly, these Greeks thought the decapitated local Greek intelligentsia got what they deserved, because Comrade Stalin was infallible. But this post is not about that either.

Now, Pontic is not mutually intelligible with Standard Modern Greek. Especially when the Pontic is spoken by someone in Sürmene or Stavropol, and not Kalamaria. You have a far better chance understanding it written, because the historical orthography used by both Standard and Pontic offer helpful hints. And if you're informed about the key differences between Standard and Pontic, it doesn't take much for you to work Pontic out: a few key words and sound changes, and you're substantially better equipped to understand it. It's not English and German, or even English and Dutch (that'd be Tsakonian); it's more like English and Scots. (Not Groundskeeper Willie Scots. Real Scots, as in "what the hell is that Aberdonian saying to me?") Nonetheless, even if it is spoken by someone in Kalamaria, snippets of Pontic on Greek TV will be subtitled; standard Greek speakers will definitely struggle to get what's going on if they hear Pontic spoken. And that distinction matters.

I'm tiptoeing around the ghost of the old (and false) assumption "language = ethnicity", because it's the debate underlying this post. This post is about the debate during the Springtime of the Nationalities, on what form of Greek to use. Vlasis Agtzidis gives a detailed account of how the debate ran, with a tug of war between the two major camps that was resolved by a committee decision in Moscow—and by death squads a couple of years later.

Agztidis' paper was on the site ocena.info, itself a fascinating subject. ocena.info appears to be down, and I've copied it to my site for now. The original citation: Aγτζίδης, Βλάσης. "Το γλωσσικό ζήτημα στις ελληνικές κοινότητες της Σοβιετικής Ένωσης", Τα ιστορικά 43, Dec 2005.

[UPDATE: the paper is back on romeyika.com]

There were three attitudes to which language should be used. A conservative attitude was to stick with what had been the prestige language variant of Greek until then, Puristic. But the 1920s was no time to be conservative in the USSR, and that faction never got a serious hearing; in fact holdouts teaching in Puristic were reported to the authorities.

No, the 1920s were a radical time, a time to put the intelligentsia in the service of the people. A time in fact for the unprecedented step of writing Greek in a phonetic Greek alphabet. My post isn't about spelling reform either though! (The previous one was.) It's about the main conflict for which language should be used. The "moderate" party advocated the Demotic of Greece. The "radical" party advocated the local vernaculars, Pontic and Mariupolitan. (Noone advocated Urum, and that's the followup post.)

The debate went on for some eight years, with different newspapers taking different sides, and intellectuals changing sides. In his 1928 grammar of Demotic, Kostas Topcharas wrote:

An objection could be addressed to our language: Why didn't we make Pontic our instrument? We will answer: Though Pontic differs from Demotic a lot, it is a dialect. Moreover it is uncultivated, and having 150,000 people cultivate it now would be both utopian and narrowly parochial.

Of course, the Springtime of the Nationalities was all about utopias and parochialism, and making Pontic a written language in 1926 was as silly as making Athenian Demotic a written language in 1876; I don't think that was the major argument for Demotic, and I'll come back to that. But by 1934, Topcharas had changed his mind, and was advocating Pontic as the written language. As I noted, his school grammar of Pontic, which has been reprinted in Greece, is where Wikipedia Pontic orthography has got its digraphs from, particularly its telltale ςς.

At the beginning, Demotic was what was used, and what we could now call communist Demotic at that: the form of Demotic favoured by the Greek Left by the '20s, following Psichari in making less concessions to Puristic than others', and so regarded by the others as extremist. As I wrote at another time, Psichari was a royalist, and the communists of the '10s regarded Demotic as a bourgeois distraction; so that this ideological colouring was not inevitable, but it has stuck since.

I'm reluctant to call it "Standard" Demotic btw, precisely because there was ongoing debate about how many concessions to make to Puristic, and Demotic was really only standardised by Triantafyllidis in 1941 (at the request of the fascist Metaxas regime, which again shows the peril of assuming neat ideological maps). But whatever the status of this Demotic in Greece, it was clearly a language of Greece, of the κατωμερίτες "down-landers", and not the language spoken by the ethnic Greeks of the USSR.

This motivated the "radicals" to advocate using the local vernaculars, and elevating them to the status of written languages. The local vernaculars were in the ascendancy for a fair while, which caused a large body of Pontic and Mariupolitan to be published. Much of it was socialist realist literature of the girl–meets–tractor variety admittedly, but it was a literature delighting in flexing its newly found muscle.

Which made it all the more surprising when the All-Union Central Committee for a New Alphabet (consisting of Greek intellectuals and Soviet linguists) decided in Moscow in 1934 that the language of the ethnic Greeks of the USSR shall be the Demotic of Greece. It was the official decision from on high, and writers and the press scrambled to comply. Agtzidis notes that the flow of local literature dried up quickly; local authors weren't even being published in Demotic, and the presses limited themselves to reprinting literature from Greece. Some "radicals" continued to agitate for Pontic, and there was going to be a second meeting of the Central Committee in 1936, to review the decision. Then came the Purge, and that was the end of local Greek literature until Glasnost.

Agtzidis expresses surprise that the local authors didn't switch to Demotic to continue publishing. Now, I admit that I probably see the world differently to Agtzidis, and that is not necessarily an asset; but me, I'm not surprised. Downlander Greek was not their language; it was an unfamiliar language they had to learn at school. Clearly it could be learned, and journalism continued in Downlander Greek; but literary authors in particular had been sold on the notion of writing in their mother tongue, the language of their daily life. (The same rhetoric after all prevailed in the literature of Greece.) And Downlander Greek was not the language of their hearth.

Which brings us back to the perilous equation of "language = ethnicity", and the implication that if you made Pontic or Mariupolitan a distinct language (that is, formed a distinct literary norm), you were making Pontians and Mariupolitans a distinct ethnicity. Agtzidis is at pains to point out that the "radicals" were not moving in that direction: they distinguished themselves from the Downlanders or from Bourgeois Greece, but they still saw themselves as kin ("the Greek race", "our nation"). That still applies: Pontians in Russia still distinguish themselves from Hellenes (and they think Mariupolitans talk funny), but they acknowledge they're part of the same family, as the forum thread I stumbled on shows.

Got to quote the Russian Pontian forum on Greece Greeks, and on Mariupolitan:

Ксерите педья оти ипе енан филос му а по тин еллада, Оти ромеяс ке елленес ехи ена ема ;-) (Elena S.)

You know what a friend of mine from Greece said, Romei [Pontians] and Hellenes [Greece Greeks] have the same blood. ;-)

Атор епика скачать румейка трагодиас а со сайт Азовские греки. И мусики эн еморфи, ам и глосса... :-) :-) :-) Агрико олигон :-| Эна трагодия легет "Ах, курциц, курциц". Та румей лен "курцицья" та корцопа! :-D Тема та пачидес йелуне полла м ато то логон. (Olga R.)

I've just been listening to Greek songs on the site "Azov Greeks". The music is beautiful, but the language! :-) :-) :-) I don't understand much. :-| One song is called "Ah, kurtsits, kurtsits!. The Greeks call girls (kortsopa), "kurtsits!" :-D Our pachudes (?) are laughing a lot with that word.

Agtzidis, I think it's fair to say, doesn't think a separate literary norm for Pontic would have been a wonderful idea. It is after all driving a wedge between Pontians and Downlanders—though that's a wedge already there in their spoken languages; making it a norm just makes the wedge official. And had the Purge not happened, Pontic in the USSR could have gone along with a diglossia like Cyprus' or Swiss German's (*not* like Greece's, which is why I keep saying Greece is a bad example of diglossia): Demotic as a standard language learned at school and used in public discourse, Pontic used in daily life and with limited use in literature.

I do think it would have been cool if the radicals had succeeded in getting their own norm. Cool in an entertainment-for-linguists way, I admit: if it wasn't for the radicals, we wouldn't have the corpus of Mariupolitan that we do (and that has not been used enough in linguistics), and we wouldn't have the poetry of Georgi Kostoprav. But I'm not convinced it would be a disaster for Hellenism; forcing Greeks to realise that Hellenism is not all about Athens is a useful thing.

At any rate, those are idle thoughts; after 1936 there was no Pontic or Mariupolitan literary norm; many of the Pontians and Mariupolitans of the USSR are now moving to Greece and learning Standard Greek, and Mariupolitan itself is fast dying out, yielding to Russian. (They're on the Ukrainian side of the border politically but not culturally.) The Greek government is sending Greek teachers to Mariupol', to teach the children there Downlander Greek—which is going to kill off the indigenous form of the language that much faster. You'll pardon me if I don't applaud the initiative.

Agtzidis' article ends with a question: Soviet language policy was eager to split ethnicities within the USSR from their kin outside: Moldavian differentiated from Rumanian, Buryat from Mongolian. Why then did Moscow affirm Demotic in 1934, instead of encouraging local norms of Pontic and Mariupolitan—which would inevitably have separated the local Greeks from the Downlanders?

I don't know, and I'm curious if readers that know about the politics of the time have any opinion. My guess is, the USSR was anxious to forestall irredentism, so they split ethnicities from speakers of the same language across the border; but Greece was very far away. When the Purge did come, the first Greeks against the wall were those who were advocating for an autonomous republic of Greeks in Southern Russia; so splittism was still a source of anxiety; but annexation from Bourgeois Greece was not.

That explains why Moscow wouldn't object to Demotic; it doesn't explain why they'd prefer it to Pontic and Mariupolitan, which were winning. That depends on who was on the committee in Moscow, and whether anyone higher up than the committee cared enough. Professional linguists were involved, and that this was tied up with them publishing descriptions of the local variants; but in 1934 USSR, that does not preclude ideological considerations. (It doesn't preclude them in say 2010 Brussels either, to be fair.)

• Maybe enough on the committee, even at that late stage, were still committed internationalists, and wanted a vehicle for solidarity with communists in Greece.
• Maybe they were hardheaded like Topcharas was (or claimed to be) in 1928, and thought it a waste of time to develop a literary norm when one was already available; the Committee had decided for Demotic in 1926, when it adopted the phonetic alphabet, and it did not change its mind in 1934.
• Maybe Demotic was removed enough from the hearth that they felt it could dampen the calls for an autonomous Greek republic, as less of a rallying point.
• And maybe it was just a local outcome, without intervention from the Politburo which didn't actually care enough about the debate—and with the moderate party being more effective at lobbying than the radicals. That there was going to be a second meeting in 1936 suggests the Committee were still open to argument.

To take us out, a sample of 1930s Mariupolitan. The collected poetry of Kostoprav are online from the 1995 publication, magnificently glossed word for word by Ioakeim Ioannidis, so I won't cite them. Instead, I'll cite from another volume of Mariupolitan literature that I got through interlibrary loan from Oxford—as it turns out, from Richard MacGillivray Dawkins' library) (yes, a different Richard Dawkins). It's the same volume I used in my post on Soviet Greek orthography, Φλογομινίτρες Σπίθες.

To be ornery for those who assume mutual intelligibility, I'm not going to gloss it, and I invite readers to have a go at translating it. This will be a problem, because the lack of mutual intelligibility means *I* don't know what it means either.

(Remember, υ is /u/, ςς is /ʃ/.)

Α.Φ. Σαρμπάςς: Όλι πες τ' αρτέλι! p. 27

Συρέφτανε πες τ' αρτέλ
Ολ' γαρίπκυ κόζμος.
Ατόρα κάμυμ δυλιά
Τίλογα δίχ-μας νόμος.

Τι μπικένιπςαςν-το πλυςς,
Τίνα χυλατράιβαν γιαλτζίδια
Ατίντς τι πέλςαντς πες τ' αρτέλ
Να χαραμόννε τ' δλία.

Μις μία τι' άλο τ' πλυςς' ς
Τιθά τς παρακαλίςυμ,
Μις ατόρα λίγυς πλυςς
Τι' άλυ καλά να ζίςυμ!

Τα τάτις-μας υρνέφκανταν
Μέρα-νίχτα πες τ' δυλία,
Αμα ατό τ' ίκςιραν-τυ
Οτ ίταν πες ςκυτνία

Ας το παλέο βαςιλία
Γαρίπ τράβαναν νιςτκάδα,
Ατό ίτυν αχ τ' ατό
Τα δλίις οτ τ' ίχαν γράδα.

Ατόρα κάμυμ δυλία
Τίπυς-πα τι νιάςςκυμιτς.
Μις-τον εργάτ, εργάτε-μας
Δύγνιμας τυ χράςςκυμιτς.

Ις-δικρό, άλυς-γυλφάν
Δυλέβυμ ςςένκα πες το ζαν.
Τα μαςςίνις τζαλέβνε,
Τα τζαράνια υςέβνε!

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Soviet Orthography of Greek

I'm working on a post on the Greek language politics of the USSR, which glancingly mentioned the spelling reform that took place there in 1925. Because it's a topic that deserves to be presented separately, I'll put it in a separate blog post.

The material isn't mine, it's from the blogger Πόντος και Αριστερά (Pontus and the Left), who in turn draws on the work of the historian Vlasis Agtzidis (who has his own blog, and who has worked extensively on the period: great to see his PhD on the Greek press of Sukhumi has just been published.) But information on the Soviet spelling reform isn't widely available in English, so I'm translating their material here.

Pontus and the Left has posted a series of posts on the Soviet Interbellum, dealing with the flowering of Greek culture in the Soviet Union during the Springtime of the Nationalities, the decade when the Soviet state encouraged nation-building for ethnic groups, including elevating their languages to literary status. Pontus and the Left's particular interest is because the majority of ethnic Greeks in the USSR were Pontians, who had migrated to Christian Russia in the 18th and 19th century. A minority were the Mariupolitans, who originally lived in the Crimea; they are linguistically intriguing, and I'll post about them one of these days.

For a summary of the spelling reform, which was used uniformly in the Soviet Union for the decade of nation building, I cite Pontus and the Left citing Agtzidis:

[Vlasis Agtzidis [Βλάσης Αγτζίδης]. 2005. "Το γλωσσικό ζήτημα στις ελληνικές κοινότητες της Σοβιετικής Ένωσης" [The language question in the Greek communities of the Soviet Union], Τα ιστορικά 43 (December): 421-448.]

The initiative for officially establishing Demotic and historical orthography began from Batumi. It was discussed and decided in teachers conventions at Kuban, Sukhumi, and later Crimea. On May 10 1926 in a Union-Wide Meeting of Greek intellectuals in Moscow, it was decided to establish Demotic instead of Puristic, and to replace the 24-letter alphabet with a 20-letter alphabet. This decision abolished [orthographic] diphthongs, preserved only ι and ο, replaced ου with υ, preserved only ς in lower case and abolished σ, wrote double consonants analytically (i.e. ξ as κς and ψ as πς) and required a hyphen for possessive pronouns.

Essentially the meeting accepted the proposal of the Central Committee for a New Alphabet to make Demotic official and replace historical orthography with phonetic. As for accentuation, stress was abolished on monosyllables and words stressed on the last syllable. These moves were completely in line with the new attitudes to language which had predominated in the Soviet sphere. The origin of these attitudes can be located in Marxist thought, where there is an effort to analyse superstructure phenomena in class terms.

The decisions of the meeting included a proposal to deal with illiteracy by publishing books in local dialects. The meeting selected Psichari's Demotic:
"A demotic pure and guileless, freed of every dead and false element, so we are not forced to revise it every so often."
“Δημοτική αγνή και άδολη, λυτρωμένη από κάθε στοιχείο νεκρό και ψεύτικο για να μην αναγκαστούμε κάθε λίγο και λιγάκι να κάνουμε αναθεώρηση”,
or, as it was written:
“Διμοτικι αγνι κε άδολι, λιτρομένι απο κάθε ςτιχίο νεκρο κε πςέφτικο για να μιν ανανκαςτύμε κάθε λίγο κε λιγάκι να κάνυμε αναθεόριςι.”

To spell out the rules:

Historical	Soviet
αι	ε
ει	ι
οι	ι
η	ι
υ	ι
ω	ο
ου	υ
ξ	κς
ψ	πς
σ	ς
γκ	νκ
γγ	νκ
αυ	αφ, αβ
ευ	εφ, εβ

The hyphen for enclitic possessives disambiguates them from the identical stressed pronouns: ο άντρας-μυ ίπε "my man [= husband] said", ο άντρας μυ ίπε "the man told me". The hyphen was also being proposed for the monotonic in Greece in the 1970s—it's in the first few volumes of Kriaras' dictionary; but it was abandoned in the official spelling, in favour of the harebrained rule that accenting the stressed pronouns is optional (ο άντρας μου είπε, ο άντρας μού είπε). Harebrained, because leaving it optional means noone will do it, and noone does.

The excerpt is in the Demotic of Greece, which was initially the language used officially by the Greeks of the Soviet Union. The alphabet was also used for Pontic and Mariupolitan, and its digraphs have been taken up in the spelling used on the Pontic Wikipedia: ςς for /ʃ/, ζζ for /ʒ/, τζ for /tʃ/, ντζ for /dʒ/, γκ for /ɡ/, νκ for /ŋɡ/. Topkharas in his grammar codifying Pontic writes [æ ø] < /ia io/ phonologically as ια, ιο, without clearly explaining how they are different from Demotic ια ιο [ja jo]—though he does point out how hard it was for Pontian schoolchildren to learn Demotic ια, ιο. He also used no accents at all.

[Τοπχαράς, Κ. 1998 [1928, 1932]. Η γραμματική της ποντιακής: Ι γραμματικι τι ρομεικυ τι ποντεικυ τι γλοςας. Thessalonica: Κυριακίδης]

(The Wikipedia orthography, which otherwise uses historical orthography, adopts Topkharas' ςς ζζ, and makes its own diphthongs εα εο for [æ ø]. I alluded to it briefly this time last year.)

I thought I should put up a more extensive sampler. This is from the collection Φλογομινίτρες Σπίθες, "Sparks foretelling a Flame".

[Leo, L., Marmarinos, A. & Kostoprav, G. (eds) 1933. Φλογομινίτρες Σπίθες; Φιλολογικι σιλογι απτα καλίτερα έργα τον ελίνον καλιτεχνον τις Σοβιετικίς Υκρανίας. Mariupol: Εκδοτικο τον εθνικον μιονοτίτον—ελινικο τμίμα.]

The collection includes works both in Mariupolitan and in Demotic. This is from L. Lefteri: Πέρα απτα ςίνορα… γιορτάζυμε, αγονιζόμαςτε, "Beyond the borders, we celebrate, we struggle." (pp. 15-16). The rule on not accenting the last syllable has not been applied. You'll have to pardon me for not translating this particular specimen of agitprop…

Κίνο το βράδι ι προκίρικςες πέςανε ςα βροχί. Παντύ—ςτο δρόμο, ςτι φάμπρικα, ςτο εργοςτάςιο, κάτο απτον πάνκο τις δυλιάς, κάτο απτο ςφιρί, το εργαλίο, ςτο ςκολιό, ςτο γραφίο—πλιμίρα ι προκίρικςες.
Ι αςτινομία λίςακςε απτο κακό-τις. Βάλτικε όλι ςε κίνιςι. Έπρεπε με κάθε θιςία να μαζεφτύνε αφτά τα «καταραμένα χαρτιά τις Μόςχας», έπρεπε να καθαριςτί ο τόπος, να βρεθύνε ι ένοχι!
Μα ι προλετάριι πίρανε μιρυδιά. Κςέραμε απτα τέτια. Ι προκίρικςι πὔπεφτε ςτα χέρια ενός διαβαζότανε από δέκα. Τι διαβάζαμε κε τι μεταβιβάζαμε από χέρι ςε χέρι. Τι διαβάζαμε με λαχτάρα, μ' ενθυςιαζμό. Μέςα ςτις λίγες φλογερές γραμές-τις βλέπαμε ζοντανί, ολοκόκινι να κςεπιδάι τιν επανάςταςι. Βλέπαμε το ρόςο προλετάριο να κςεςικόνετε ενάντια ςτο λιςτί–καπιταλιςτί, ενάντια ςτον τςάρο· το μυζίκο τις απέραντις Ροςίας να κςεςικόνετε πάνο ςτον τςιφλικά, ν' αρπάζι τι γι ςτα χέρια-τυ. Βλέπαμε μάχες, έματα, παραζάλες, νίκες, θρίαμβο… Ι μάζα νικάι. Τςακίζυντε ι οχτρί.
Βλέπαμε τι λίςα τις πανκόζμιας μπυρζυαζίας. Ι μπυρζυάδες όλον τον χορόν τρίζυνε τα δόντια-τυς, γιατί ςιντελίτε το ιροικό, νικοφόρο, μεγαλόπρεπο ςοςιαλιςτικό χτίςιμο. Βλέπαμε το λέφτερο πια μυζίκο να καλιεργί το κολεχτιβικό χοράφι με τράκτορ, μ' αγροτικές μιχανές. Στο εργοςτάςιο ι ζοί βράζι. Ι ςτρατιές τον υντάρνικον εχτελύνε τα βςτρέτςνι. Πςιλά τα τέμπα τις ςοςιαλιςτικίς ανικοδόμιςις. Αλάζι το πρόςοπο τις απέραντις χορας το Σοβιέτ. Νέα ζοί προβάλι. Ο οχτρός πιότερο τρίζι τα δόντια-τα. Λιςάι. Ετιμάζι επίθεςι.
Κε μιλύςε ακόμα το χαρτί, μιλύςε, καλύςε ςε προςοχί: «Προλετάριι όλυ τυ κόζμυ ιπεραςπίςτε τι μαχιτικί μπριγάδα τις πανκόζμιας επανάςταςις!»

⁂

Θ' άκςιζε αςφαλός να κατεβύμε τι μέρα ετύτι ςτυς δρόμυς, να γιορτάςυμε με το λέφτερο ρόςο εργάτι κι' αγρότι, να δίκςυμε τιν αγάπι-μας, να δόςυμε τον όρκο-μας, πος θα ςταθύμε πάντα πιςτί ιπεραςπιςτές τις προλετάρικίς-μας πατρίδας, να ςιςφίκςυμε πιότερο τις γραμές-μας, να παλέπςυμε διαδιλόνοντας, πος κ' εμίς θα τραβίκςυμε ςτον ίδιο δρόμο.

⁂

Κςιμέροςε ι μέρα τις επανάςταςις—ι μέρα τυ γιορταζμύ, μα κε τυ αγόνα.
Ι πόλι ίνε γιομάτι από ένοπλες δίναμες. Το φάζμα τυ κομυνιζμύ τρομάζι τι μπυρζυαζία—Ι ΕΣΣΔ φοτίζι το δρόμο—Κινιτοπιί λιπόν τις δίναμές-τις.
Μα ι προλετάριι δεν κλονίζυντε. Ίνε αποφαςιζμένι να γιορτάςυνε, ν' αγονιςτύνε, να κατεβύνε ςτυς δρόμυς. Δεν κερδίζετε ι λεφτεριά δίχος πάλι, δίχος έμα.
Τραβάμε κατά ομάδες ςτον τόπο τις ςινκέντροςις. Τα όργανα τις αςτινομίας μας διαλίυνε, μας χτιπάνε, μα εμίς πάλι μαζεβύμαςτε, τραβάμε ένας-ένας ίτε διο-διο κι πυ μας έλεγε το «καταραμένο χαρτί», εκί πυ μας καλύςε ι κοματικί οργάνοςι.

⁂

Ι μάζα τριγιρίζι ένα πρόχιρο βίμα. Στα πρόςοπα ολονόν-μας λάμπι ι χαρά, ο ενθυςιαζμός… Ένας λεβέντις εργάτις ανεβένι ςτο βίμα. Σικόνι πςιλά τι γροθιά-τυ. Τα λόγια-τυ απλά, μα… γιομάτα φοτιά. Ι ςπίθες, πυ βγένυνε απτο ςτόμα-τυ, ανάβυνε ολόγιρα μια πιρκαγιά. Κάθε τυ λόγο ι μάζα τον κάνι δικό-τις.
Μιλάι… για τι ροςικί επανάςταςι, για τι ςτράτα τυ Λένιν. Καλί ς' αγόνα. Το… «Εμπρός τις γις ι κολαζμένι» ςκεπάζι τα τελεφτέα λόγια-τυ.
Ένα λιςαςμένο ςκιλολόι κςεφιτρόνι απτιν άκρι τυ δρόμυ. Πλακόςανε τα ένοπλα ςκιλιά. Ορμάνε. Βαράνε. Ιποκόπανι, πιςτολιές, φοτιά, βόλια…
Ι μάζα άοπλι αμίνετε, επιτίθετε, χτιπάι με πέτρες, με κςίλα, μ' ότι βρίκι μπροςτά-τις.

⁂

Το ντυφέκι, ι ένοπλι δίναμι, ο ματοβαμένος φαςιζμός «θριάμβεπςε», «νίκιςε»!… Κάμποςι πλιγομένι… ένας νεκρός… γιομάτι έμα ι δρόμι.
Το τίμιο έμα τις εργατιάς χίθικε πάλι. Μα πάνο ςε τύτο το έμα δόςαμε τον όρκο-μας. «Νίκιςε» ακόμα μια φορά ο οχτρός μια «δοκςαζμένι νίκι»…
Μα ο προλετάριος—ετύτος ο γίγαντας, ο αγονιςτίς τυ δρόμυ ςφίνκι πιότερο τι γροθιά-τυ, πικνόνι πιότερο τις γραμές-τυ ίςτερα από κάθε τέτια «νίκι» τυ οχτρύ.
Δεν ίνε μακριά ι τελιοτικί νίκι, ι δικιά-μας νίκι, ι προλετάρικι νίκι. Ι ςτράτα πὔδικςε ο Λένιν, μέςα απτιν οπία διαβένυνε νικιφόρα τα εκατομίρια τον προλετάριον τις χόρας το Σοβιέτ ίνε ολόφτι.
Ι δίναμες τις επανάςταςις ςιςφίνκυντε. Το προλεταριάτο πικνόνι τις γραμές-τυ. Σιμένι ι αποφαςιςτικί μάχι!

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Pontic in Cyrillic orthography

I'm perusing that Russian Pontian forum some more. The Pontic is done in Roman script by some (default foreign script these days, I suppose), and Cyrillic by others. The Mariupolitan I'd seen in print had a systematic mapping, including Дъ and Тъ for ð and θ. Things are more chaotic here: θ is usually ф—the default Russian transliteration—or с *shudder*, and ð is just д. On the other hand, at least one poster came up with гь for ɣ; and to my delight, one poster dealt with the notorious minimal pair of kʰi "not" vs. ki 'and" by transliterating the former Tsakonian-style, as кхи. (Greek historical orthography ignores the phonetics here, and uses etymology instead: 'κι < ουκί vs. κι. The Pontic spoken in Turkey maintains the initial vowel in uç, so they don't have that problem.)

As happens in longstanding diasporas (and as Greeks in Greece prefer to ignore), the Russian Pontians do not immediately feel that Standard Greek is their language, or that they are Greeks (as opposed to "the same as Greeks"). I liked this exchange. (Pardon any misinterpretations—or better, comment to correct them.)

• Elena S: И Кардия му тосо поли харисе гьяти акуса ромейка! Нэ, препи на вруме то Прасинос, ксери поли кала ромейка! "My heart was so gladdened to hear Romeic. [Which is what Pontians outside Greece call Pontic.] Yes, we must find Prasinos, he knows Romeic very well."
  

  Better than Elena, presumably, since she's slipped up and used a Standard Greek subjunctive. As Dima points out immediately...

  
  
• Дима Топалов: Эко кхи ганево эленика. Калачепсон ромейка... "I don't understand Hellenic. Speak Romeic!"
  
• Elena S: мборо мборо алла ти мон ти глосса ине меси эллиника то ксеро поте имун стин еллада его ивра 70% ромейка логия.Ке кексеро кала ромейка нунизо, фело ке на мафено па. "I can, I can; but my language is half Hellenic, I know! When I was in Greece I found 70% of the words were Romeic. And I don't know Romeic well, I know; but I am trying to learn." [I was guessing a bit there, the Pontic dictionaries are at home.]
  
• ЯнисСПБ: не, маса ти ромейка,хасон та эллиника.Ан са пас син Эллада панда эпорис акека кала намасанц ато ти хлосса. "Yes, learn Romeic, lose the Hellenic. If you go to Greece you can always learn that language quite well there."
  
• Дима Топалов: хриса лоя!!! "Golden words!"
  
• Elena S: Ксерите педья оти ипе енан филос му а по тин еллада, Оти ромеяс ке елленес ехи ена ема. :-) "You know guys, what a friend of mine from Greece said. Romei and Hellenes have the same blood *wink*"
  

Indeed. Interestingly, a lot of the posters did end up in Greece—there's been continuous migration from the former Soviet Union (Russia, Georgia, Ukraine) over the past 15-odd years. Haven't got the time yet to check whether they stuck with Cyrillic or switched to Latin; but I didn't notice Greek script from them :-)

Greek in Turkish orthography

In the history of Greek, Greek adjusts to the orthography of the culture it falls under; and cultures have their own scripts. So the Catholic Greeks, and the Greeks of the Venetian cultural sphere, wrote in Roman script with Italian spelling. The Greek-speakers of Southern Italy now write Greek in Roman script with Southern Italian spelling (ddh for [ɖː], for instance). When Mevlana Rumi and Sultan Walad wrote their few verses of Greek scattered among their divans (and I need to post the transcriptions, they've really changed over time), it was in Arabic script. The little bits of Yevanic we have are all in Hebrew script. The Mariupolitan Greeks have settled on a Cyrillic orthography. And of course it went the other way round: Orthodox Albanians used Greek script, Catholics used Latin, Muslims used Arabic. The Karamanlides, Turkish-speaking Christians, used Greek script for Turkish.

H/t my friend George, the latest instance of this is the Muslim Pontic speakers, who have remained in Turkey, using Turkish orthography. Take this from romeyika.com:

Paleya temeteri i trani ontan uç eksernan alo ğlosa çe ethelenan kati na leğun t' enan t' alo, eleğan aletera çe eğriçenan aletera. Emis pa estekam çe eterenamatinus çe tipo uç eporenam n' eğrikume. Aytika esane pola ama ata pal exathan çe epiğan. Ula enespalamata. Eğo oso erthan so num çe oso eporesa na sorevo apada ce apaçi, esorepsa çe eğrapsata. Ada katu na diğo sas eliğa apata nto esorepsa çe esis pa an erxuntan so nusuna aytika, enositeta apo katu. Na min anespalkuntan çe xantane çe pane.

Some decidedly un-Turkish placement of ğ, of course, and x unapologetically for the voiceless velar fricative. And of course there's no standard in place. Wikipedia (bless) in its article on Pontic notes dh for /ð/ (and h or kh for /x/); I just saw d and x. I note one of the commenters uses ä for [æ] (like Pontic written in Greek script uses α̈), while the website admin just uses e. The Soviet (pre-Stalin) Pontians, who had a phonetic Greek script with no diacritics (so ςς was [ʃ]) had the best solution: historically and phonologically [æ] is /ia/, so they just spelled it ια, and trusted you could do the phonetics in your head.

For jollies, let's do it the way a Christian Pontian would. Only with more misaccentuations:

Παλαία τεμέτεροι οι τρανοί όνταν ουκ έξερναν άλλο γλώσσα και έθελεναν κάτι να λέγουν τ' έναν τ' άλλο, έλεγαν αλέτερα και εγροίκεναν αλέτερα. Εμείς πα εστέκαμ και ετέρεναμ ατους και τίπο ουκ επόρεναμ ν΄εγροικούμε. Αούτικα έσανε πολλά άμα ατά παλ εχάθαν και επήγαν. Ούλα ενέσπαλαμ ατα. Εγώ όσο έρθαν σο νου μ' και όσο επόρεσα να σωρεύω απαδά και απακεί, εσώρεψα και έγραψα τα. Αδά κάτου να δηγώ σας ελίγα απ' ατα ντο εσώρεψα και εσείς πα αν έρχουνταν σο νου σουνα αούτικα, ενώσητε (?) τα από κάτου. Να μην ανεσπάλκουνταν και χάντανε και πάνε.

(One thing: a Christian Pontian would say 'κ, not ουκ̌. The Ancient Greek negator has survived with all its phonemes intact only in the Of valley. And the Christian Pontian will call his ancestral language "Pontic"—a modern learnedism—and not Romeic, or as this passage does, "Different." Neither are eager to continue the old confusing habit of calling themselves Lazoi. But otherwise, the same blithe ignoring of subjunctive aspect, the same columnar stress, the same focus particles.)

Of course, there's plenty of back story to the fact that Pontic gets written in two scripts. (Cyrillic too, according to Wikipedia; I've certainly seen Mariupolitan in Cyrillic, and I have no reason to doubt it for Pontic, I just haven't seen any... Er, strike that.) The Muslim Pontians may be hospitable enough to the visiting Christian Pontians these days, but they're pretty insistent about their Muslim identity, and they won't be happy to be told that their script isn't the Real Way of writing Pontic. Which makes me wonder what will happen to the Pontic wikipedia. It's a Greek script (and Greece) affair so far, but "Start Writing in the Forum" does appear in both Greek and Turkish orthography.

I also note that the Pontic wikipedians have worked out their own diacritic lite orthography. Including dealing with the problematic [æ ø] as the non-Greekish (so non-confusable) εα εο. A bold and unfamiliar solution, which makes me uneasy—in other words, a resounding success!

But what is this I see? A Tsakonian Wikipedia? Έννι αραμού μακρζυά, όννι μπορού να γράφου γρούσσα πφ' όννι νοού... ...Read more