35.3297, Review: Historical Linguistics, Morphology, Syntax; Iranian Syntax in Classical Armenian: Mondon (2024)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-35-3297. Thu Nov 21 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.3297, Review: Historical Linguistics, Morphology, Syntax; Iranian Syntax in Classical Armenian: Mondon (2024)

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Date: 20-Nov-2024
From: Jean-François Mondon [jfmondon at gmail.com]
Subject: Historical Linguistics, Morphology, Syntax; Iranian Syntax in Classical Armenian: Mondon (2024)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/35.1434

AUTHOR: Robin Meyer
TITLE: Iranian Syntax in Classical Armenian
SUBTITLE: The Armenian Perfect and Other Cases of Pattern Replication
SERIES TITLE: Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2024

REVIEWER: Jean-François Mondon

SUMMARY

Robin Meyer’s Iranian Syntax in Classical Armenian is the 53rd
installment of Oxford’s Studies in Diachronic and Historical
Linguistics series. It is a very welcome first foray of the series
into Armenian, a seemingly often overlooked branch of Indo-European.
Due to its notable extended contact with speakers of Iranian languages
starting in its pre-literary history, Classical Armenian offers
fertile ground to explore issues of contact linguistics. It is the
morphosyntactic effects of this contact which Meyer studies in this
work, an expansion of his 2017 Oxford dissertation, predominantly
focusing on the Classical Armenian perfect tense.

 Following a short introductory chapter outlining the contents of the
book, Chapter 2, ‘Linguistic Evidence for Iranian Influence on
Armenian’ (p. 7-32) begins with a concise overview of Armenian and
Iranian interactions. From the first mention of Armenia in King Darius
I’s Behistun inscription (520-518 BCE) through to Armenia’s
incorporation into the Sasanian Empire until the latter’s fall (651
CE), Meyer sketches a brief external history of this region of the
world tucked between the Caucasus and Taurus Mountains in the north
and south respectively, the Euphrates in the west, and modern
Azerbaijan in the east. The meat of the chapter, however, is the
linguistic effects of the roughly 1100 years of contact between
speakers of Iranian languages and Armenian. Meyer first delves into
lexical and phonological effects, the most researched area of Iranian
influence on Armenian. Working in chronological order through the
successive Iranian languages which would have been spoken adjacent to
Armenian, Meyer clearly summarizes the data and literature showing
that Parthian by far left the most residue, as compared to Old Persian
and Middle Persian. Old Persian borrowings, while slim, are
nonetheless important, as seen by examining Armenian partez ‘garden’
(cp. Avestan pairidae:za- ‘fenced area’), which shows the borrowing
must have occurred during the Armenian consonantal shift, part of
which converted inherited d to t and inherited p to h or nothing.
Partez was subjected to the former change but not the latter. Middle
Persian, for its part, was the source of more borrowings than Old
Persian, but as Meyer states in citing Bolognesi (1980: 33), the
semantic sphere of such borrowings is much more curtailed than the
Parthian borrowings.  The duration of contact between Parthian and
Armenian must have extended over multiple generations as earlier loans
can be differentiated from later loans as evinced by their undergoing
certain vocalic alternations. Specifically, certain vowels change
their quality and length when they move out of the locus of stress,
the final syllable of a word, usually triggered by the addition of a
morpheme. For instance, earlier loans differentiate stressed e: from
unstressed i, as in the nominative plural de:mkh ‘face’ versus its
corresponding genitive plural dimach. Later loans make no such
distinction, maintaining e throughout, as in the nominative singular
den ‘religion, faith’ versus its genitive singular deni. Morphological
influences on Armenian can be found in numerous derivational morphemes
derived from both Iranian affixes and compounds, both of which Meyer
clearly lays out in data-rich charts (p. 26). Additionally,
phraseological calques seem to have potentially infiltrated Armenian
under Iranian influence. For instance, compare Armenian hur harkanel
‘to strike fire (literally: to throw fire)’ with Modern Persian a:tash
zadan.

Meyer puts on the historian’s hat in Chapter 3, ‘Sociohistorical
Evidence for Iranian Influence on Armenian’ (33-58). In this chapter
he systematically works through all epigraphic and literary sources
which mention Armenians and Parthians, and most particularly those
sources which mention their languages. He strives to determine whether
all Armenians were bilingual. We glean from a story in P‘awstos
Buzand’s Epic Histories, that some higher ranking officials must have
been bilingual. In the story the king of Armenia decapitates the chief
of stables of the Persian king after the latter verbally dishonored
the Armenian king by spewing insults “in the Persian language.” That
bilingualism did not permeate all of society is evident, however, by
the author Elishe:’s mention of the Armenian priest Levond’s need for
an interpreter when speaking with a Sasanian interlocutor. Meyer
concludes, “Owing to the lack of contemporary Parthian documents and
the absence of code-switching or code-mixing in the Armenian evidence,
there is no indication that either language was restricted or favoured
in any particular context. Conversely, however, that does not mean
that there was no diglossia” (57-58).
Chapter 4, ‘Morphosyntactic Alignment’ (59-125), begins to delve into
the main objective of the book: is the Classical Armenian perfect the
result of Iranian influence? The Classical Armenian perfect is unusual
in the Armenian verbal system in being the only analytic formation in
the language, consisting of a form of the verb ‘to be’ and the
Armenian participle. Several additional curiosities mark the formation
as even stranger, the most striking being a genitive subject when
transitive though a nominative subject when intransitive. Meyer’s
unique insight is to view this discrepancy of subject marking as an
ergative system, which he hypothesizes entered Armenian in the
preliterary period through Iranian influence. Chapter 4 offers a very
rich discussion of the morphological range of ergative-absolutive v.
nominative-accusative languages followed by an ample overview of why
previous attempts at explaining the Armenian morphosyntactic data fall
short. He then delves into the traces of ergative systems in Iranian
languages, showing that an Old Persian passive construction, the
infamous ‘taya mana: krtam’ construction, engendered a split-tense
ergative construction in West Middle Iranian, with a periphrastic
perfect also being the main analytic construction in Middle Iranian
(Haig 2008). Meyer claims that it is this formation which was
incorporated into Classical Armenian.

In Chapter 5, ‘The Syntax of the Armenian Perfect’ (126-169), Meyer
lays out his data analysis of the periphrastic perfect in Classical
Armenian, ultimately seeking to see its de-ergativization through
time. Aside from observing the subject marking of transitive verbs, he
also traces the second curious feature of this formation:
subject-copula agreement when intransitive though no agreement when
transitive, the copula appearing in the 3rd singular instead if it
appears at all. In order to attempt to approach actual Armenian as it
was spoken, he eschews any texts which are translations from other
languages, mostly Greek or Syriac, thus ruling out the early Bible
translation. Additionally, he strives to admit texts from the same
general genre, in his case historical writings. By both these
limitations his study is confined to five writers, whose work offers
6,998 occurrences of participles (p. 128). He is quite cognizant of
the shortcomings of attempting to get to the form of the language
actually being spoken as well as the fact that the data by its very
nature only reflect a certain socioeconomic class of the population,
but researchers must make do with the texts which exist.

With regard to the genitive subject of transitive verbs, the data show
its decline through time as nominative subject marking rises. As for
the copula, its appearance in transitive constructions also rises
through time, influenced – Meyer hypothesizes – by the use of the
copula in intransitive perfects and the impossibility of subject-verb
agreement with the genitive subject of transitive constructions. In
sum, then, Meyer proposes that the Parthian past tense was an ergative
construction centered on a participle without an accompanying copula.
Before the written history of Armenian commenced, this construction
was borrowed into the language and subsequently adapted to Armenian.
One such adaptation was the use of genitive subjects with transitive
verbs, based on “functional parallels between the Armenian genitive
and the Parthian oblique case and enclitic pronouns, which mark
possession” (151). Another adaptation was the use of the third
singular copula in transitive structures.

If the periphrastic perfect had indeed been borrowed from Iranian into
Armenian, then it is expected that other syntactic constructions
likewise found their way into Armenian. The search for such additional
borrowings is the focus of chapter 6, ‘Other Cases of Iranian-Armenian
Pattern Replication’ (170-213). Meyer first treats Armenian nominal
relative clauses, in which the relative clause lacks a verb. For
instance, amenayn or i nosa ‘everything which [is] in them’ is
literally ‘everything which in them’ without a verb.  While such
constructions are attested in other Indo-European languages from
Hittite and Vedic to Latin and Greek, where it is particularly falling
out of use in the latter two (p. 177-180), it is possible that the
West Middle Iranian ezafe-construction influenced and sustained the
Armenian use of this potentially inherited construction. The Iranian
syntagma was mainly used to express possessive or explicative
relationships between a noun and another noun or adjective: m’d cy
dyw’n “mother of demons,” which is comparable to the Armenian example
above or to anun Astuacoy or tearn arararcoc‘ “name of God which (is
that) of the lord of creation.”  Meyer concludes that the “data
remains insufficient to provide any indisputable answer” as to its
precise origin (p. 181). He effectively reaches the same conclusion
for the other two constructions he discusses, though he indicates
pattern replication is more likely: the functional distribution of
Armenian ink‘n as an intensifier and anaphor, and the use of (e)t‘e:
as a complementizer, quotative, and both direct and indirect question
marker.

Chapter 7, ‘Parthian-Armenian Language Contact and its Historical
Context’ (214-254), offers a thorough outline of contact linguistics
and the different types of language shift. He concludes that the
Parthian influence on Armenian is in some sense comparable to the
ultimate result of the Norman French infiltration in England. The
ruling classes were sufficiently bilingual in Armenian and Parthian,
but the Parthians would have spoken a Parthian-influenced Armenian.
Due to their sociopolitical position of power, this version of
Armenian was adopted by younger generations of Armenians in addition
to Parthians, who themselves ultimately switched to Armenian fully as
they came to associate with the culture, much as the Norman French
began to identify with the British population with whom they were
intermarrying. The external history of the period supports such a
proposal: “the establishment of a hereditary dynasty of Arsacid
Parthian rulers over Armenian under Xosrov I, the fall of the Parthian
Empire and relegation of the Iranian Arsacids to second rank, the
Christianization of Armenia, which included the Arsacid ruling class,
and the subsequent political and religious rift between Armenian
Arsacids and Sasanian Iran” (p. 240-241).

The book concludes with a short final summary chapter, an appendix on
the etymology of the Armenian participle, references, and an index.
The appendix on the participle traces its origin to the addition of
*-lo- to a thematic realization of *i, the stem of Armenian i-verbs,
which are largely passive-intransitive. Such a thematic formation,
*-ye/o-, is in fact the origin of the Indo-Iranian ya-passive. There
is some support that a proto-form *-iye/o-lo- could yield Armenian
-eal, as Meyer lays out (p. 278). An interesting conclusion of this
approach is Meyer’s dissociation of the -ea- seen in the aorist -eac‘-
form the -ea- seen in the participle -eal. They do not come from the
same stem.

EVALUATION

Meyer makes a strong case for seeking the origin of the Armenian
periphrastic perfect construction in Iranian. Beyond that conclusion,
however, this book should serve as a blueprint for how to do solid
research into contact linguistics of dead languages. Additionally, his
outline of ergative-absolutive languages in Chapter 4 and his
discussion of the types of contact situations between languages in
Chapter 7 could both usefully serve as background readings for courses
dealing with either topic. Suffice it to say that any work which
leaves the reader wanting to track down more of the author’s output
has been a successful endeavor.

REFERENCES

Bolognesi, Giancarlo. 1980. L’Armenia tra oriente e occidente:
incontro di tradizioni linguistiche nei secoli che precedono e seguono
la prima documentazione scritta. In Transcaucasica II, Venice:
Università degli studi, 26-42.

Haig, G. L. J. 2018. Alignment Change in Iranian Languages: A
Construction Grammar Approach. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Jean-François Mondon is an Associate Professor of Global Studies at
Muskingum University in New Concord, OH. His research interests are
Indo-European Linguistics, Distributed Morphology, and Language
Pedagogy.



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