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Alignment Change in Iranian Languages
The Iranian languages, due to their exceptional time-depth of attestation, constitute one of the very few instances where a shift from accusative alignment to split-ergativity is actually documented. Yet remarkably, within historical syntax, the Iranian case has received only very superficial coverage. This book provides the first in-depth treatment of alignment change in Iranian, from Old Persian (5 C. BC) to the present. The first part of the book examines the claim that ergativity in Middle Iranian emerged from an Old Iranian agented passive construction. This view is rejected in favour of a theory which links the emergence of ergativity to External Possession. Thus the primary mechanisms involved is not reanalysis, but the extension of a pre-existing construction. The notion of Non-Canonical Subjecthood plays a pivotal role, which in the present account is linked to the semantics of what is termed Indirect Participation. In the second part of the book, a comparative look at contemporary West Iranian is undertaken. It can be shown that throughout the subsequent developments in the morphosyntax, distinct components such as agreement, nominal case marking, or the grammar of cliticisation, in fact developed remarkably independently of one another. It was this de-coupling of sub-systems of the morphosyntax that led to the notorious multiplicity of alignment types in Iranian, a fact that also characterises past-tense alignments in the sister branch of Indo-European, Indo-Aryan. Along with data from more than 20 Iranian languages, presented in a manner that renders them accessible to the non-specialist, there is extensive discussion of more general topics such as the adequacy of functional accounts of changes in case systems, discourse pressure and the role of animacy, the notion of drift, and the question of alignment in early Indo-European.
eBook
Trends in Iranian and Persian linguistics
\"This set of essays highlights the state of the art in the linguistics of Iranian languages. The contributions span the full range of linguistic inquiry, including pragmatics, syntax, semantics, phonology/phonetics, lexicography, historical linguistics and poetics and covering a wide set of Iranian languages including Persian, Balochi, Kurdish and Ossetian. This book will engage both the active scholar in the field as well as linguists from other fields seeking to assess the latest developments in Iranian linguistics.\"-- Publisher's website.
Book
Action nouns in -i̯a- and a new verbal stem jsīn- “to kill” in Khotanese
This article addresses derivational issues related to palatalization in Khotanese, focusing on action nouns of the kīra- type (< *-i̯a-). It is argued that diachronic palatalization conforms to the rules of synchronic palatalization and that the origin of the hapax legomenon jsīna- “killing” (Z 13.124), which apparently violates these rules, needs to be interpreted differently. It is traced back to a reduplicated Indo-Iranian verbal stem *ǰa-ghn- (cf. Young Avestan jaɣn-) < Proto-Indo-European *gwhé-gwhn- “to strike repeatedly” → “to kill”. This stem is also reflected in the Khotanese gerundive jsīñaa- “to be killed” < *dzai̯n-i̯a- ← *dzaɣn- < Iranian *ǰa-gn-. The article contributes additional evidence supporting the development of the preconsonantal voiced velar fricative *ɣ into *i̯ in pre-Khotanese.
Journal Article
Kurdish (Sorani) dictionary & phrasebook : romanized Sorani-English, English-Sorani
This ... phrasebook uses the official Sorani Latin alphabet to aid instant communication\"--P. [4] of cover.
Book
A COMPARATIVE LENS ON ΚΡΑΤΥΣ ΑΡΓΕΪΦΟΝΤΗΣ: MEANING, ETYMOLOGY AND PHRASEOLOGY
Greek κρατύς and cognates (κράτος, κρατερός, etc.) are related to Vedic krátu- ‘resolve’ and Avestan xratu- ‘[guiding] intellect’. The cumulative phraseological evidence supports this etymological proposal: in at least ten cases, Greek personal names and phrasemes exhibiting a cognate of κρατύς (that is, κράτος and compounds with first member κρατ[α]ι-) combine with terms whose Indo-Iranian linguistic cognates are joined with Vedic krátu- and Avestan xratu-. Furthermore, Indo-Iranian expressions, in which Vedic krátu- and its compounds are referred to a god as attributes, are structurally comparable to Greek κρατὺς Ἀργεϊφόντης. Since Ἀργεϊφόντης is likely to reflect ‘shining (cf. Greek φαίνω) with whiteness/brightness (ἀργει-)’, it is possible to identify Vedic phraseological matches for the Greek formula, namely expressions in which Vedic krátu- and its derivative krátumant- combine with the notion of ‘shining widely’, Vedic ví-bhā (Vedic bhā being a linguistic congener of φαίνω). The phraseological correspondence between Vedic krátu- … agní- ‘Agni, [endowed with] resolve’, and κρατὺς Ἀργεϊφόντης ‘Argeiphontes, endowed with superior might (κράτος)’ may be added to the dossier of common phraseology which the Greek god shares with the Old Indic fire-deity.
Journal Article
Action nouns in Vedic support-verb constructions with kṛ
Action nouns can be formed from verbal roots in Vedic Old Indo-Aryan following various derivational patterns. The question is whether, and to what extent, such nouns, if derived from the same underlying root, can be considered equivalent or synonymous. It has been argued by several scholars that deverbal *
stem and *
stem action nouns were functionally-semantically different in Proto-Indo-European and ancient Indo-European languages such as Greek, Latin and the Indo-Iranian languages basically preserved this distinction. In this context, Benveniste pointed out that support-verb constructions in Ancient Greek, as a rule, involved -σι-stems (< *
) as nominal hosts and not -τυ-stems (< *
). The present paper shows that the same distribution of the two types of action nouns can be observed in the support-verb constructions of Early Vedic as well, a fact that nicely corroborates the assumption of their fundamental functional-semantic difference. It may be expected that further research will be able to reveal similar distinctions between other types of action nouns on the basis of analogous distributional patterns.
Journal Article