Speaking of Armenian

[muckefuck]

It's been so long since I spent any serious time on my Armenian materials (despite acquiring a sweet new Classical Armenian grammar in my recent Seminary Co-op linguistics book binge) that I forgot that Modern Western has developed suffixed possessives, e.g.:

ẓi "horse" ẓis "my horse"
hayr "father" hayrnis "our father"

This a feature also shared by Persian, Turkish, and the Semitic languages, e.g.:

Persian: asb "horse" asbam "my horse"; pidar "father" pidarimān "our father"
Turkish: at "horse" atım "my horse"; ata "father" atamız "our father"
Arabic: ḥiṣān "horse" ḥiṣāni "my horse"; abū "father" abūna "our father"

It makes me wonder if we could be dealing with a Sprachbund phenomenon, i.e. one that has spread between genetically un- or distanly-related languages spoken in the same area. What I really need to see is more data from varieties related to those mentioned above, but spoken outside of the proposed linguistic area. For instance, you don't see the same phenomenon in Hindi or Greek. (Note that Greek has possessive clitics, but this don't work the same way. For instance, ho híppos mou "my horse", but ho kállistos mou híppos "my best horse". The other languages don't exhibit this kind of movement, e.g. *amenalaws ẓi.)

Comments

[wiped.livejournal.com]

i'm curious about your persian transliteration. pidar (as in پیدر) is not a persian word, as far as i know, and there's no entry for it in the "farhang moaser one volume persian-english dictionary" (you were asking about a good persian-english dictionary a while back; i'd recommend this one. it was published in 2001 and it's comparable to the steingass dictionary in terms of comprehensiveness).

the word should be pedar (پدر), and furthermore "our father" would be pedaremān (پدرمان). i don't know if the spellings you have reflect the pronounciation in old or middle persian, or simply a method of transliteration i'm not familiar with.

the sprachbund idea is an interesting one. georgian, which has had a lot of arabic, persian, and turkish influence, also uses suffixed possessives.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I'm rather surprised you don't recognise this method of transliterating Persian vowels since it is the one that Steingass (and such agencies as the American Library Association) uses. For lack of a better term, you could call it "arabicising"; macronless <a>, <u>, and <i> represent, respectively, /æ/, /o/, and /e/.

Nevertheless, you're right that I misspelled the 1P suffix; under this system, it should be -imān, not *-amān. I'll correct that anon.

Oh, and thanks for the tip about Georgian; I had no idea. Do you have any idea how old those pronominal suffixes are? Do they exist in Old Georgian?

[wiped.livejournal.com]

you're right, my bad. none of the dictionaries nor grammars i use employ that method, so it caught me off guard.

unfortunately, i've no idea how long georgian has had pronominal suffixes, but i do know someone i can ask, so i'll get back to you.

[alcarilinque.livejournal.com]

Finno-Ugric languages also show the sort of 1st person -N, 2nd person -T-like possessive suffixes, too. Given history of Uralic languages I'd vote on some sort of sprachbundish/areal phenomenon being at work here. I don't know about a convergence, but there's certainly a relation in these suffixes.