The attestation of syntactic archaisms in Tsakonian

Nick Nicholas

National Schools Interoperability Program

In his dissertation, Liosis (2007: 6.2.4) claims that Propontis Tsakonian preserves a number of syntactic archaisms, which were already retreating in the early 20^th century in Peloponnesian Tsakonian under the influence of Standard Modern Greek, and which had only a vestigial presence among the very oldest terminal speakers he surveyed. These archaisms had also been noted by Pernot (1934) and other linguists working on Tsakonian, and include: mobility of auxiliaries; post-position of clitics; and complement and adverbial (gerundial) participles. (A fourth particularlity, the use of relativiser pʰias a non-factive complementiser, is an innovation rather than an archaism, albeit an innovation that occurs repeatedly in Greek dialect: Nicholas (2000).)

In order to trace the speed with which these phenomena retreated in Peloponnesian Tsakonian, I survey all early Tsakonian texts available to me. The gerundial participle (itself not absent from Standard Modern Greek) is relatively healthy even in late Tsakonian; the other constructions are sporadic even in relatively early texts, and demonstrate that Tsakonian had already undergone significant pressure from Standard Greek in the 19^th century.

References

Λιόσης, Ν. 2007. Γλωσσικές επαφές στη νοτιοανατολική Πελοπόννησο. Διδακτορική διατριβή. Θεσσαλονίκη: Αριστοτέλειο Πανεπιστήμιο.

Nicholas, N. 2001. A survey of Modern Greek dialectal complementation. In A. Ralli, B. D. Joseph & M. Janse (eds.), Proceedings of the first international conference of Modern Greek dialects and linguistic theory (Patras, Greece, Oct. 12–14, 2000), 193–206. Patras: University of Patras.

Pernot, H. 1934. Introduction à l’étude du dialecte tsakonien. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.