Gender, definiteness and word order in Ulağaç Cappadocian

Of all the Cappadocian dialects, Ulağaç Cappadocian is considered the most ‘corrupt’ by Dawkins: “Nowhere is the vocabulary so filled with Turkish words or the syntax so Turkish” (1916: 18). Kesisoglou singles out the following as being characteristic: the loss of grammatical gender distinctions and the resulting neuterisation of nouns, including the the generalized use of the neuter article do, pl. da (1951: 4). In the case of transitive clauses this results in potential ambiguity, as nominative and accusative NPs are not distinguished morphologically. Kesisoglou quotes the following example: itó do néka do ándra-t páasen do do xorjó, which could either mean ‘that woman led her husband to the village’ or ‘that woman, her husband led her to the village’ (1951: 49). To disambiguate such cases, the article is often omitted under the second interpretation according to Kesisoglou (ibid.): itó do néka ándra-t páasen do do xorjó. Likewise, itó do peí vavá-t çórsen do ‘that child, its father saw it’ vs. itó do peí do vavá-t çórsen do ‘that child saw its father’ (ibid.). This suggests that the article is omitted in the case of subject NPs, but not in the case of object NPs (Janse 2019: 100). Upon closer scrutiny, however, it turns out that the article can only be omitted if the noun is historically masculine or feminine, but not neuter. In this paper, I investigate the use of the article in transitive clauses containing two overt NPs in connection with the word order and information structure of these clauses as means of distinguishing subject from object NP

Door het oog van de naald: het Cappadocisch Grieks

Cappadocian is an extremely endangered Greek dialect which was spoken in Central Turkey until the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange of 1923-1924. This involuntary emigration to Greece caused the near-extinction of this dialect. Nowadays the number of Cappadocian speakers and semi-speakers has decreased to approximately 2,800. Fortunately this very remarkable dialect, which was thoroughly influenced by the Turkish language, has been captured in many orally transmitted folktales that were recorded by philologists and dialectologists from the nineteenth century onwards. One of these stories is ‘The Shepherd’, a very short folktale in the Cappadocian subdialect of the village of Axo, which was written down by Richard M. Dawkins. This folktale is most likely one of the numerous versions of the story about the one-eyed giant, the Cyclops, best known from its variant in Homer’s Odyssey. In this paper a critical edition and Dutch translation of ‘The Shepherd’ is published

Door het oog van de naald : het Cappadocisch Grieks

Cappadocian is an extremely endangered Greek dialect which was spoken in Central Turkey until the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange of 1923-1924. This involuntary emigration to Greece caused the near-extinction of this dialect. Nowadays the number of Cappadocian speakers and semi-speakers has decreased to approximately 2,800. Fortunately this very remarkable dialect, which was thoroughly influenced by the Turkish language, has been captured in many orally transmitted folktales that were recorded by philologists and dialectologists from the nineteenth century onwards. One of these stories is ‘The Shepherd’, a very short folktale in the Cappadocian subdialect of the village of Axo, which was written down by Richard M. Dawkins. This folktale is most likely one of the numerous versions of the story about the one-eyed giant, the Cyclops, best known from its variant in Homer’s Odyssey. In this paper a critical edition and Dutch translation of ‘The Shepherd’ is published