Happy New Year! I’m not a believer in new year’s resolutions but I do intend to post more frequently here over the next couple of months, at least with news items of interest.
Check out this interesting article in the Independent yesterday presenting Ioanna Sitaridou’s claim that Romeyka, an endangered dialect of Pontic Greek still spoken by around 5000 Muslim Greeks on Turkey’s Black Sea coast, preserves features of archaic Greek not known in any other modern variety. For instance, Romeyka preserves the use of the infinitive in various contexts in which you would never find it in standard Greek, or (apparently?) even in the Pontic Greek spoken in Greece and the diaspora. Sitaridou is completely correct in noting,”What we don’t yet know is whether Romeyka emerged in exactly the same way as other Greek dialects but later developed its own unique characteristics which just happen to resemble archaic Greek.” There doesn’t appear to be a formal publication associated with this article, but I’ll be looking out for one.
Glossographia 
One thought on “Romeyka”