Lezing Mark Janse: The Cappadocian Mixing Facility

Cappadocian, also known by its collective name as Asia Minor Greek, is an archaic, basically Medieval, variety of Greek which has borrowed heavily from local Anatolian Turkish varieties. As such it has become a textbook example of a 'mixed language' (Thomason & Kaufman 1988; Thomason 2001; Winford 2003; Matras 2009; Hickey 2010). After a brief sketch of the history of Cappadocian I present some of its more spectacular contact-induced innovations such as Turkish SOV-type pattern replications in the syntax, the borrowing and integration of Turkish loan verbs, the origin and development of agglutinative noun and verb inflections, and a peculiar type of vowel harmony.

MARK JANSE is BOF-ZAP Research Professor in Ancient & Asia Minor Greek at Ghent University. His research interests include Ancient & Modern Greek linguistics & dialectology, Homeric and Byzantine metre and versification, Ancient Greek obscene language, language variation and change, language contact and language death, with particular attention to Greek-Semitic and Greek-Turkish language contacts. He is well-known for his research on Cappadocian Greek on which he has published extensively, including a grammar. His personal involvement with its speakers has earned him the honorary title 'Ambassador of the Cappadocians' and is the topic of a documentary film 'Last Words' (seriousFilm, 2014). He was a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College (2007 & 2014), an A1 Foreign Fellow of the Onassis Foundation (2008 & 2015), an Onassis Senior Visiting Scholar at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford & the University of Arizon (2012) and a Fellow of Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies (2013), where he holds an appointment as CHS Associate in Greek Linguistics (since 2017).

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