Cappadocian is a mixed language which is diachronically
descended from Greek but has borrowed heavily from Turkish with which it
has been in contact for eight centuries. From a typological perspective,
Turkish is an SOV language: the unmarked word order is Subject- Object-
Verb and as a typological corrollary it has prenominal modifiers (adjectives,
pronominal determiners and relative clauses) and verbal and nominal
suffixes. Turkish word order is, however, relatively free and determined by
information-structural considerations, particularly new versus background
information. Greek word orded is determined by the same principles, but in
the case of Cappadocian there is an apparent conflict between inherited
Greek and borrowed Turkish structures. Much research has been carried
out on Turkish pattern replication in Cappadocian but word order has not
been studied in any depth. Greek word order is notoriously difficult to
understand and only recently has it been studied from a modern linguistic
perspective. The study of a variety of Greek which is both archaic in its
inherited and innovative in its borrowed grammatical features is both
fascinating to the layman with a knowledge of Greek and/or Turkish and to
the specialist interested in Greek, Turkish, historical and contact linguistics.