The Cypriot dialect in the context of the Grammar of Medieval and Early Modern Greek

David Holton of the University of Cambridge presents the findings on Cypriot Greek from the four-volume Cambridge Grammar of Medieval and Early Modern Greek (covering c. 1100 to c. 1700), after introductory remarks in Greek by Antria Neophytou, Andreas Foullas and Angel Nicolaou-Konnari at the University of Cyprus.

Holton begins with the corpus of Byzantine and medieval Cyprus texts used by the project. The four major literary and legal monuments are the Assizes of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and Cyprus, the Chronicle of Leontios Machairas, the Chronicle of Boustronios, and the 16th-century Venice manuscript of Petrarchan poems known as the Cypriot Canzoniere. To these are added shorter translations such as the Fior di Vertù and around twenty-five publications of non-literary documents and letters.

He then groups grammatical, syntactic and phonological features under four headings. First are features often thought of as Cypriot that in fact had a wide medieval distribution across the Greek-speaking world: third-person plural verb endings in -ousi alongside -oun, spontaneous gemination of intervocalic consonants (also attested in southern Italy, Sicily and the Dodecanese), the quantifier oulos, the deletion of yod in imperfects such as elalen, the retention of the unstressed syllabic augment, and the placement of clitic pronouns after the verb.

Second are features found predominantly in Cyprus with sparse attestations elsewhere: the second-person singular pronoun esou, the merger of the genitive and accusative plural of masculine nouns and pronouns (which Holton argues is an internal morphological development rather than an Old French influence), verbs with the affix -isk-, and periphrastic personal pronouns such as is afton mou.

Third are features exclusive to Cypriot texts in this period: the retention of -an- stems where mainland Greek develops -ain- (such as manthano for mathaino), the gradual disappearance of the demonstrative aftos in favour of toutos and ekeinos, comparatives formed with geminate -tt- or with the adverb perittou, the adjective delipos ('remaining'), masculine agent nouns in -ios (principally in the Assizes), dissimilatory haplology in forms like kin ton, and the oxytone verb dido.

Fourth are innovations attested earliest in Cyprus before appearing centuries later in standard Modern Greek, including the forms pio and pia without lambda, the comparative megalyteros, and the conjunctive phrase pas kai. Holton closes by assessing the state of editions of medieval Cypriot texts and arguing, against views of complete Lusignan isolation, that Cyprus shared ongoing morphological developments such as the aorist passive in -ika and the gerund in -ontas with the rest of the Greek world. A question-and-answer session in English and Greek follows on masculine genitive-accusative levelling, palatalization, editorial orthography, the representation of postalveolar consonants in manuscripts such as an inscription at Kolossi, and unpublished 16th-century administrative texts from the Karpas.