sound replacement in loans

Tue Dec 18 07:28:09 UTC 2007

Dear friends and colleagues,
many thanks for your so helpful comments on my little query concerning a 
possible 'relationship' between [sh] and [%] (= voiced pharyngeal stop) 
in loans. Let me briefly clarify a bit the problem: The language in 
question is Caucasian Albanian (CA). Till recently, practically nothing 
had been known about this language spoken in Northern and Western 
Azerbaijan between roughly 300 and 900 AD. It is said to have been the 
'official' language of the Christian Kingdom of (Caucasian) Albania 
(300-700 AD) also used in religious service. In 1996, Zaza Aleksidze 
from Tbilisi identified the lower layers of two Palimpsest manuscripts 
found in the St. Katharine monastery on Mt. Sinai  (1975) as containing 
text in the so-called Caucasian Albanian script. So far, this script was 
known only fragmentarily (some very brief inscriptions and a Medieval 
alphabet list): The scirpt differs totally from Old Armenian and Old 
Georgian, although it clearly belongs into the 'same' context). The two 
manuscripts include some 120 pages with CA texts in their lower layers 
that, however, are heavily erased and mostly extremely difficult to 
read. Preliminary studies done by Zaza Aleksidze supported the 
hypothesis that we have to deal with an early variant of Udi, an 
Southeast Caucasian language nowadays spoken by some 5.000 people in 
Northern Azerbaijan and in the diaspora (basically Russian and Armenia).
    In 2003, Jost Gippert (Comparative Linguistics, U Frankfurt) and I 
have started to decipher and interpret the lower layer of the 
Palimpsests. The bulk of the work is now done (it took us more than four 
years to decipher the sound values, to restore the texts, and to 
translate them (the CA Palimpsests will be published in several volumes 
of /Monumenta Palaegraphica Medii Aevi/, Series Ibero-Caucasica at 
Brepols (Tournhout) in 2008). The texts include fragments of a early 
Christian lectionary and fragments of the Gospel of John. In sum, the 
texts document roughly 10.000 CA word tokens (that gives us about 1.000 
lexical entries). The language has /nothing/ to do with Balkan Albanian: 
The resemblance of the two ethnonyms is coincidendal and due to the 
Ancient Greek interpretation of the local name *Alwan (as albanioi). CA 
clearly is East Caucasian, a so-to-say 'aunt' of Modern Nizh Udi. Thus 
the Palimpsest for the first time allows to describe the earlier stage 
of an East Caucasian language (probably 500-600 AD). For more details 
see Gippert & Schulze 2007. Some remarks on the Caucasian Albanian 
Palimpsest. In: /Iran and the Caucasus/ (11) 2007:201-212 and 
http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/Cauc_alb.htm (Attention! Page is 
not updated!). 
    So far the background. Now let me briefly come back to my original 
question. As I have said earlier: I have to respect Jost Gippert's share 
in the copyright of the CA data and hence cannot give concrete examples. 
But let me 'paraphrase' them: In the CA texts there are at least three 
loans from language A that are marked for a [sh] in the donor language: 
CshVC, CVrshVC, and CVrshVCVC. In CA, the loans yield the form CV%VC, 
CV%VC, and CV%VCVC respectively. The last two examples may suggest the 
hypothesis that the cluster [rsh] is changed to [%], what would come 
close to what Marie-Lucie Tarpent has suggested:  [sh] "/might have 
undergone extreme retroflexion in the borrowing language, and then be 
interpreted as a consonant involving the extreme back of the mouth, all 
the way to the pharynx.  The development of the manner of articulation 
and the glottal state of this new consonant could be secondary to that 
of the new place of articulation./" In fact, some of the pharyngealized 
vowels in Modern Udi (as well as in CA) probably stem from old */Vr/, 
although the pharyngeal may likewise be original/old in other words. 
However, the first example (CshVC > CV%VC) shows that the shift from 
[sh] to [%] happened without the present of [r]. Naturally, we might 
argue that here the shift has taken place in analogy to the process 
[rsh] > [%]. But things become more difficult, if we consider some 
original, that is 'Lezgian' CA words that contain [%] and that may have 
cognate in Modern Udi containing [s'] (a dento-alveolar voiceless 
fricative [a so-called 'middle sibilant']). The three (?) relevant pairs 
do not argue in favor of the presence of *-rsh- in Pre-Udi/CA. 
Unfortunately, the data are too few to prove that [sh] in the donor 
language A is /systematically/ replaced by [%] in CA, but we do not have 
counter-examples. So, we start from the hypothesis that the process is 
quite 'regular' within the relationship between Language A (donor 
language) and CA.
    Well, that's just to put my question into the corresponding context. 
I will consider all your proposals in order to get closer to that puzzle 
- I guess all of them will help.....
Best wishes, and many thanks again,
Wolfgang                              

-- 

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*Prof. Dr. Wolfgang 
Schulze                                                                   
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