Open Online Seminar: In search for the lost Greek infinitive in Anatolia

Dr Ioanna Sitaridou will present an online lecture entitled In search for the lost Greek infinitive in Anatolia, on Thursday 15 October, at 7.00pm, as part of the Greek History and Culture Seminars offered by the Greek Community of Melbourne.

"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", Dr Sitaridou explains.

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.

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

Audiences can enjoy the seminar in two ways:

• 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 the link here.
• 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.

When: Thursday 8 October 2020 @ 7.00pm

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