The 2021 Kenneth E. Naylor Memorial Lecture will take place on April 2, 2021 at 9:30AM via Zoom. Dr. Mark Janse (Ghent University) will present "Cappadocian (Asia Minor Greek): The Life and Times of a Language Once Believed Extinct".
Mark Janse is BOF-ZAP Research Professor in Ancient & Asia Minor Greek at Ghent University and Associate in Greek Linguistics at Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies. A specialist in the history of the Greek language from Homer up to the present day, he is the world’s authority on the Cappadocian dialect of Asia Minor.
In his lecture, Dr. Janse will discuss the history of Cappadocian Greek, highlighting the intensive language contact between Cappadocian and Turkish during the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922). Numerous Turkish words and grammatical structures entered Cappadocian, making it a textbook example of a ‘mixed’ language, with important implications for genetic linguistics. More recently, after the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923-24, Cappadocian speakers rapidly shifted to Greek so that Cappadocian was generally believed to have died out in the 1970s. However, in 2005 Dr. Janse, working with Dimitris Papazachariou (University of Patras), discovered in Greece native speakers of Misiotika, a Cappadocian dialect. Dr. Janse concludes his lecture with a discussion of the revaluation and revitalization of the language in recent years.
Registration is required for this lecture. You can RSVP here.
If you have any questions about accessibility or wish to request accommodations, please contact Derek Peterson at peterson.636@osu.edu. Typically, a two weeks' notice will allow us to provide access.
