Nuristani

[Richard F.Strand]

Stephen Georg wrote:

>PS: as I just discover, your fine web-site contains some answers to my
>questions, and I'd like to recommend it for anyone interested. But maybe there
>are more features of N[uristani] lg. relevant for Aryan subclassification
>which could be mentioned ?

I'm glad that you found my website useful.  I am in the process of preparing
for my site a summary of the current phonological processes that distinguish
the speech of the diverse linguistic communities of the Nuristan region.
These processes provide some interesting insights into the development of
Nuristani and Indo-Iranian in general from PIE times, and I have prepared a
chart depicting this development.  For presentation on the Web this is a
labor-intensive task, so I beg your indulgence for a month or so until it
appears.

As for the distinctiveness of Nuristani within Indo-Iranian, we find in it
an intertwining of Iranian and Indo-Aryan processes; but the relative
chronological ordering appears to be:

proto-Aryan > Iranian > Indo-Aryan > Nuristani,

which is consistent with the hypothesis that the Nuristanis were ethnically
non-Aryas who were first overtaken by the proto-Aryan expansion, later swept
up in the Iranian sphere, migrated eastward into the Indo-Aryan sphere, only
to be expelled again by Iranian speakers (Afghans) into their present
homeland.  A simple Stammbaum obviously can't properly depict the
relationship of these languages.  Nuristani is best described as a
"satellite" to the Aryan (Iranian and Indo-Aryan) languages, rather than as
a "branch" of the Indo-Iranian group.

Nuristani before it ended up in Nuristan is as much defined by what it
avoided as by what it shared with its Indo-Iranian neighbors.  After it
shared an Iranian process of dentalizing lamino-alveolar affricates (< PIE
palatals), it avoided the simplification of the resulting dental affricates,
as happened in Iranian.  It avoided the harshening of *s after *u.  There
are possibly distinctive treatments of vocalic *rH (e.g., Kamviri /dra~g'aR/
'long', with close /a/ instead of expected open [vriddhied] /A/).  Stay
tuned to my website for more details.

Morphologically distinctive is the system of local adverbs, with suffixes
that seem to go back to PIE *-ro, *-no, *-mo indicating, e.g., in Kamviri,
specific location, nonspecific location, and expanse, respectively.  If the
former two suffixes are indeed those of the ancient heteroclites, their
local meanings in Nuristani may shed some light on the original distinctions
encoded in the ancient alternating *r/*n stems (*r = specific item on the
energy path [nom. & acc.] vs. *n =  indefinitely located item on the motion
path [oblique cases]).  *mo may have originally indicated an outward
expansion of the root action, as in Skt. bhu:mi 'earth'.  More details of
this system appear on my website.

>Some references would be welcome, too (post-Morgenstierne).

Check out the bibliography on my site, but not much new on the historical
position of Nuristani has been added beyond Morgenstierne's fundamental
contributions.

     Richard Strand

     Richard Strand's Nuristan Site
     http://users.sedona.net/~strand