Pontic Greek language? |
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Pontic Greek is a Greek language which was originally spoken on the shores of the Black Sea, the Pontus.
Pontic's linguistic lineage stems from Attic Greek, and contains influences from Byzantine Greek, Turkish, and, to a lesser extent, Persian and various Caucasian languages.
Greek colonies had been established on the shores of the Black Sea since antiquity. Placed under Byzantine control in the Middle Ages, they remained isolated from the rest of the Greek-speaking world afterward.
Pontic was imported to Greece with the multitude of Greek immigrants from Turkey after the 1923 mass death marches and genocide along with the Armenians and Assyrians that followed the Treaty of Lausanne. Further immigration of Pontic-speaking Greeks followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.
Nowadays, Pontic is spoken by 350,000 people: 200,000 in Greece, 120,000 in Georgia ("Rumka"), and small communities in other countries of the former Soviet Union and Turkey (in Trabzon) . A small portion of Greek-Americans speaks Pontic.
Pontic and Standard Greek are mostly mutually incomprehensible, both because they developed independently for almost two millenia, and because of the influence of Ibero-Caucasian languages on Pontic in the middle ages.
- Example 1: Pontic en (is), Ancient Greek esti, Koine idiomatic form enesti, Biblical form eni, Modern Greek einai
- Example 2: Pontic temeteron (ours), Ancient Greek to(n) hemeteron, Modern Greek to(n) * mas
- Example 3: Pontic diminutive paid-in (little child), Ancient Greek paid-ion, Modern Greek paid-i
- Example 4 (combining 2 and 3): Pontic temeteron to paidin (our little child), Ancient Greek/Koine to hemeteron paidion, Modern Greek to paidi mas
