Draft of Aspects of Yaghnobi Grammar November 5, 2007
Posted by Bahrom in Linguistics, Science, Syntax, Yaghnobi.Tags: Endangered language, Grammar Sketch, Language Description, Language Typology, Morphology, Morphosyntax, Yagnobi, YAI
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Today I submitted a draft of my MA thesis, Aspects of Yaghnobi Grammar, to my thesis review committee. I am also posting a copy here. I would appreciate the time any of you may take to read this draft and value any comments that you might make. There are still some issues with formatting, hopefully these won’t distract you from the content. Here are links to Adobe acrobat files for each chapter:
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Overview of the Yaghnobi Language
Chapter 3: Nominal Morphology
Chapter 4: Verbal Morphology
Chapter 5: Grammatical Relations
11/10/07 Update: I finished chapter 6.
Chapter 6: Copular Clauses
I will need to make any revisions in the next week and a half, so I will appreciate getting any feedback soon.
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Are you in touch with the University of Bologna team, directed by A. Panaino ? They started working in the Yaghnob valley in 2005 in collaboration with the Tajik Academy of Sciences.
I had not heard about the work of the University of Bologna. I would be very interested in learning more about what they have done.
Hello Sebastian,
I know a bit about the Yaghnobi-Project of Antonio Panaino, I took part in this summer’s Yaghnobi Summer School in Ravenna…
To Brian,
I didn’t have much time to see your work in details yet, on the first sight it looks to be a great deal about the language.
As I saw the IPA-based transcription, I have few comments:
1) Please change all /w/’s to /β/’s (in cluster VwC, Vw# you can keep /w/ or write /β̯/ or /u̯/ also, f. ex. imperative ˈʃaw/ˈʃaβ/ˈʃaβ̯/ˈʃau̯ but infinitive ˈʃaβak) to correspond the pronunciation of the language.
2) Pleae note that in the system I presented in my summary of Yaghnobi pronunciation I do not use marks for long /o/ and /e/ in a similar way as Xromov, in Yaghnobi all /e/ and /o/’s are allways long (of course they are shorted in some dialectal pronunciation, but historically you can’t have those vowels short…
3) As we spoke about the problem a bit earlier, I would advice you to use Xromov-based transcription of the language, it’s more accurate than IPA-transcription, in that case you should distinguist the nature of varieties of short /u/ and /i/ and also some other vowels, the Xromov’s system elegantly avoids this problem, Cyrillic orthography, as you know, is also less accurate for it does not mark length of vowels and does not distinguish between v/w …
I hope this weekend I’ll have some time to study your stuff, go on workin’
luboss
Thanks for the helpful feedback. You’re right about /w/, I should have used /β/. I listened to the recordings I again and I can hear that this is the correct transcription.
I’ve uploaded chapter 6, the last chapter! I’ll look forward to any additional comments that you have.
Brian,
when I was reading some stuff about Ossetic I found some similarity with Yaghnobi system in numerals: in Ossetic every noun is in genitive when following a numeral other than “one” - f.ex. in Digor dialect “duw(w)æ xwæri” - two sisters, it is similar to Yaghnobi “du xóri” … this prooves that the Yaghnobi “numerative” ending -i is the oblique ending with its special use in this case (we discussed some aspects of origin of the oblique in Yaghnobi earlier, in Ossetic the Iranian genitive merged with locative as -i in Digor dialect and as -y in Iron dialect, it’s origin is the same as oblique -i in Yaghnobi)…