Tongue Tied III - Pondering Pontic Greek
The double headed eagle, insignia of the Eastern Roman Empire. (Photo credits: via Wikimedia Commons)
‘Tongue Tied’ is a short tour through Europe via some of its most at-risk languages. In a series of four articles, Columnist Kieran McGreevy will examine four languages from across the corners of Europe, with the aim of showing what has led these languages to the brink of extinction (and sometimes back), by untying the history of the people, the linguistics of the language itself, and the efforts being made to keep these tongues alive. In the third instalment, Kieran looks at Pontic Greek, a descendent of vernacular Ancient Greek spoken in the Eastern Roman Empire.
Fact File
Name:
Pontic Greek (Roméika/Romeyka)
Language family, subfamily:
Indo-European, Hellenic
No. of speakers:
778,000, but with only 200,000-300,000 active speakers
Geographical spread:
Primarily in Northern Greece, but historically and to a lesser extent presently in Turkey, as well as in Russia, Armenia, Georgia, and Kazakhstan, and by speakers emigrating around the world, for instance in North America.
History
Looking first at the name Romeyka, readers would be excused for imagining that this article might be about another linguistic descendent of Latin – like French, Romanian, Occitan, – but it is actually the name used by specific subsets of speakers of Pontic Greek in modern-day Turkey to refer to their own language. The term was actually used to refer to the vernacular form of post-classical Greek used around the time of the Byzantine Empire, which was not referred to as this at the time, but instead as the Eastern Roman Empire. But how did Romeyka speakers, of Ancient Greek linguistic descent, come to be in Turkey?
The history of this distinct people and language began when speakers of Ionic Greek – an eastern dialect of Ancient Greek – started to leave Greece around the 7th century BC (as if the medieval beginnings of the subjects of the last two articles wasn’t old enough). They left Greece to travel to Turkey’s Black Sea region in search of silver and gold, arriving in the area they then named Pontus, from the Ancient Greek word meaning ‘sea’, appearing thus as the etymological origin of the term coined very recently to describe this dialect of Greek: Pontic Greek.
The early culture of these people is representative of a merging of Ancient Greek culture with those of the people indigenous to the Black Sea region upon their arrival, and of course this has been carried forward to the modern day, as can be seen with the use of the lyra in traditional Pontian folk music (for examples of this, see the end of the article!). After the split of the Roman Empire, Pontus became the birthplace of the Komnenos dynasty and its descended branches that ruled the Byzantine empire from 1082 for nearly 400 years. Despite this, there is very little literature in the vernacular medieval language, with most records and literature being written in Atticistic Greek, which was perceived as being purer and removed from the Pontic and other spoken Greek languages with their more eastern providence. Thus, Pontic Greek was mostly preserved through a rich oral tradition and folklore, which persists to this day in Pontic songs that are popular in Greek.
But with the Empire’s fall at the hands of Mehmed II and the Ottoman Empire in 1461, the vernacular language began to be further marginalised. In the 18 years it took for the Pontic resistance to fall to the Turks, many nobles and aristocrats married into foreign dynasties, ensuring a continuation of their power and influence should the empire collapse. Later, during the 17th and 18th centuries, as more land around the Black Sea was lost to derebeys (feudal lords that were a somewhat autonomous part of the Ottoman Empire), many Pontians were forced to move to the Pontic mountains, named so in English for this migration. From the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the end of Ottoman period (taking us all the way to 1922), many Pontian Greeks converted to Islam, either due to pressures and violence from governments, or a desire to avoid higher taxes imposed on Orthodox Christians.
The Pontic genocide, carried out upon the Christian Ottoman Greek population of Anatolia during World War I and its aftermath (1914-22), was an act of ethnic and religious cleansing on behalf of both the Ottoman Empire, and after its collapse the Turkish National Movement. Many massacres occurred and many Eastern Orthodox cultural, historical, and religious monuments were destroyed, forcing an exodus of Pontian Greeks back to the homeland of their ancestors before their exodus in the 7th century BC. The 1926 Greek census reported a total of 240,695 Pontic Greek refugees, of whom over 75% had fled the Pontus region of Anatolia in modern-day Turkey, explaining the size of the Pontic Greek-speaking population in Greece at the time of writing, as well as the quick decline in active native speakers, since often those who survived in Turkey, Muslim and Orthodox Christian alike, no longer felt safe in outwardly displaying cultural and linguistic pride.
Features
Many phonological (sound) features of Ancient Greek that are not maintained in the Standard, national language are retained in Pontic Greek including: the pronunciation of -η- as /e/, instead of Standard Greek /i/, as well as -ω- as /o/ rather than /u/:
νύφε [nífe] vs. νύφη [nífi], “bride”
ρωθώνι [roθóni] vs. ρουθούνι [ruθúni], “nostril” (/θ/ = like “th” in think)
the consonant cluster /sp/ preserved from Ancient Ionic-Greek, while it changes to /sf/ in Standard Greek:
σπάζω [spázo] vs. σφάζω [sfázo], “slaughter”
and the stressed vocalic sequences -éa- and -ía- are kept instead of -á-:
βασιλέας [vasiléas] vs. βασιλιάς [vasiʎás], “king” (/ʎ/ = close to “lli” in million)
You may be familiar with the active and passive voice, as we have them in English; this refers to the distinction between she punches and she is punched. You can see from these sentences that the first, active expression is what linguists call synthetic – where the verb itself changes with endings to express different meanings – while the second, passive sentence is analytic – where extra words, rather than endings, are added to change the meaning. Modern Greek, both Pontic and the Standard is one of two Indo-European languages (alongside Albanian) to still express the passive synthetically:
εφανερώθα [efaneróθa], “I was revealed” (-θa = past passive voice ending)
Some morphological endings of Ancient Greek not found in Modern Greek are still found in Pontic Greek varieties: ancient ending -ος (/os/) as opposed to -η (/i/) for female adjectives:
η άσκεμος [i áʃkʹemos], “the ugly” (/ʃ/ = “sh” in English)
the past imperative – such as you better have that cleaned by… – ending -ον rather than -ε in Standard Greek:
ποίσον [píson], “have done”
as well as limited use of the infinitive (the English form with the word to before it, such as to eat), which is no longer a feature of Modern Standard Greek. This is nevertheless limited largely to verbs following modals and the word before (prin, in Pontic Greek), and confined to a set of particularly retentive sub-dialects spoken by Muslim speakers of Pontic Greek, who incidentally are those speakers who still refer to their language as Romeyka:
Prin pisini fain, “before making food”
Here you can also see Pontic Greek written in the Latin script, as it is when it rarely comes to be written down by speakers in Turkey, under the influence of the Turkish government and language.
We have already discussed the active and passive voices, where the subject of the first is the thing doing the action, and the subject of the second is having the action done to them. In both Standard and Pontic Greek, there exists a middle voice, where the subject is both performing and undergoing the same action. The difference between the two, lies in the fact that yet again Pontic Greek remains closer to the morphology and phonology of Ancient Greek:
Στεφανούμαι [stefanume], “to crown/be crowned” (-ούμαι = middle voice ending)
Recovery
For many Muslim Pontic Greek (or here, Romeyka) speakers in Turkey, spoken around the villages of Of, the history of the language they speak and the culture it relates to are all but unknown to them. The absence of written records, at least of this variety of Pontic Greek, means that they have no direct connection to the past outside their families, who just a century prior may have been dispersed all over Europe and even the globe. In the opinion of some scholars, the Pontic variety spoken here in Asia Minor today may not survive, due to its limited number of speakers concentrated in as few as 40 villages, and the language as a whole is classified as endangered by UNESCO.
Nevertheless, the future is not all bleak, and the descendants of those speakers who took part in the exodus from Turkey and other countries after the first World War into Northern Greek have had comparatively more success. In Northern Greece, Pontic songs are particularly popular, with the rich oral tradition of the language, despite the difficulty Greek speakers had in understanding this language or variety which, at least to the ear, appeared very different (whether it is a separate dialect or language is insignificant, and in many cases, one will find that there is no clear distinction between the two).
But it’s not just music: there are organisations – such as the Argonauti-Komninoi Pontic Greek Association – and museums – such as the Museum of Pontian Hellenism – devoted to the protection of the language and culture. The association, among cultural events like hosting plays, also hosts lessons in Pontic Greek that are open to anyone, as well as in 50 different, traditional dances; it was founded in 1930 to house and feed the thousands of Pontic refugees, and there are 600 similar organisations all over the country. A member of one of these associations, Galatia Sitaridi, says “people die because we forget them. If we don’t forget, they live on with us,” and this sentiment will hopefully be what helps to preserve the language, memory and culture of the long marginalised Pontics that have survived till today.
Links for exploration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJUQP8Nn4So&t=38shttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJUQP8Nn4So&t=38s – Video in Pontic Greek about the experience of a man fleeing Pontus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcAYP4irSyQ&t=28s – Cambridge video of Dr Sitaridou on her research into Romeyka
https://www.oeaw.ac.at/vlach/collections/greek-varieties/pontic-greek/video-collection/folk-songs – Website full of traditional folk songs
https://neoskosmos.com/en/2020/08/17/news/community/free-online-course-plots-a-way-to-pontian-language-culture-and-history-through-its-songs/ – Article about a course (that you can enrol onto), with songs as a medium for teaching language and history