Early Christian Neo-Aramaic poems from Iraqi Kurdistan offer the scholar a vivid portrayal of a dialect, found in the middle of the Neo-Aramaic territory, at a moment in its diachronic development when traces of split ergativity were still present. A first simple attempt has been made to assess the syntactic conditions which facilitates the marking of definite objects in 17th century poems. From a statistical point of view, preverbal nominal objects are more frequently indexed in the verbal complex than postverbal objects. The opposition between preverbal and postverbal position of the nominal object appears to be more relevant in short verse lines than in long lines. The history of the manuscript transmission of the very same poems offers, on the other hand, evidence that a variant of this dialect has almost completely lost all traces of ergativity sometime before the 19th century, through a process of leveling which has effected in similar ways the majority of North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects. The Neo-Aramaic phenomenon is compared with the so-called decay of ergativity in Kurdish. As any other diachronic structural development, the loss of ergativity is somehow regulated by a complicated interplay of different factors: morphologic and syntactic change and the consequent internal process of morphologic and syntactic leveling. An external factor such as the influence of split-ergative or non-ergative contact languages could have reinforced or facilitated the processes of both diachronic change and leveling.
Neo-Aramaic and the So-Called ‘Deacay of Ergativity’ in Kurdish
MENGOZZI, Alessandro
2005-01-01
Abstract
Early Christian Neo-Aramaic poems from Iraqi Kurdistan offer the scholar a vivid portrayal of a dialect, found in the middle of the Neo-Aramaic territory, at a moment in its diachronic development when traces of split ergativity were still present. A first simple attempt has been made to assess the syntactic conditions which facilitates the marking of definite objects in 17th century poems. From a statistical point of view, preverbal nominal objects are more frequently indexed in the verbal complex than postverbal objects. The opposition between preverbal and postverbal position of the nominal object appears to be more relevant in short verse lines than in long lines. The history of the manuscript transmission of the very same poems offers, on the other hand, evidence that a variant of this dialect has almost completely lost all traces of ergativity sometime before the 19th century, through a process of leveling which has effected in similar ways the majority of North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects. The Neo-Aramaic phenomenon is compared with the so-called decay of ergativity in Kurdish. As any other diachronic structural development, the loss of ergativity is somehow regulated by a complicated interplay of different factors: morphologic and syntactic change and the consequent internal process of morphologic and syntactic leveling. An external factor such as the influence of split-ergative or non-ergative contact languages could have reinforced or facilitated the processes of both diachronic change and leveling.
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