Pontic Greek

[Ptolemy]

Pontic was spoken by Greek speakers in many subdialects over a vast area subdivided into regions distant from one another. The figure of the Pontic speaking population was set at ca. 200,000 some forty years ago. (Papadopoulos - 1941). New calculations are more accurate: Before 1922 there lived in Pontos ca. 700,000 greek-speaking people while another ca. 500,000 had emigrated, mostly in the 19th century and in the period 1908-1922 to South Russia, to the United States and Elsewhere. About 257,000 Pontic Greeks perished as a result of the recurrent blows of calamity from the turkish tyranny.

In 1923 the compusory exchange agreement was made and implemented. :The convention concerning the exchange of Greek-turkish population was signed by Greece and Turkey at Lausanne on 30 January 1923, antedated by six months the general peace treaty of Lausanne to which it was affixed. The comprehensive settlement was formally achieved by the Lausanne Peace trety of 23 July 1923. The Pontos Greeks who were exchanged in 1923 were 400,000 and most of them settled in Macedonia. There is some literature also on the Pontic Greeks of Caucasus.

Pontos is the most important of the regions in Asia Minor in which Greek-speaking populations (descended from byzantine time) survived in the 19th and 20th centuries, and they survived in considerable numbers throughout the town and villages located between Rize (Ριζαίον) in east Pontos and Gerisun (Κερασούς) in the west. The principal centers were Trapezounta, Oenoe, Samsun (Amisos) and Gumushane (Argyroupolis). There were 102 Hellenophone villages listed in the pontic area. The byzantine greek-speaking population was most numerous in the Pontic regions. This fact coincides with the information from the Ottoman tax registers showing the spread of the most numerous Christian population in this area. (Vryonis op.ct.450) And the existence of the large numbers of Graecophone Christians in Pontos during Ottoman time is, to a agreat extend, owing to political facts (Unlike the situation in Capadocia)

Sources for research of Medieval Pontic are five-fold:
a) Inscriptions
b) documents, official and private
c) works written on Pontos or by Pontic Greeks
d) Acritic and other fold songs
e) the contemporary spoken and written Pontic dialect with its subdialectal varieties.
Thus the Acta of the Vazelon monastery are precious: Three of them are of the year 1245, few were composed after 1461 (they year of the dissolution of the empire of trapezounda) and 79 of the documents are dated by century. The medium of the Pontic dialect is not the Pontic dialect. In fact their writers are generally monks, priests, or the other more or less literate. However, in these same documents many traits of the Pontic dialect of the date of composition are present. Some investigators have offered their contributions to the study of the language of the Acta.

[Ptolemy]

The chronicle Περί των Μεγάλων Κομνηνών (of the period 1204-1426) by Michael Panaretos (1320-1390) presents a similar situation. The writer attempts to carry his own Pontic usage, into the comon Byzantine usage, albeit without full success. For this reason there apperar traits of the Pontic dialect on every page.

Pontic, one may argue, is not merely a dialect but another distinct language of Greek, from which it split very early, probably in the first centuries of our era such as the 4th century. The ionic linguistic survivals in Pontic do, in fact, prove the continuity of language, and that continuity presupposes the ethnic continuity of these Pontic greek-speakers. Insofar as the Pontic dialect is concerned, Hatzidakis had stated in 1912 that "On account of its remote geographical location <the pontic dialect> not only was not altogether assimilated, as it seems, from the start to the common Greek but also having separated early from the rest of the Hellenic state and the Hellenic world developed its own life, independent from the rest of the greek language.

To be continued...