About:
Gorani refers to under-documented, endangered varieties spoken in a cluster within the Zagros mountains (Iran/Iraq). These varieties possess conservative features of importance to linguists. However, their study has been plagued by nomenclature and taxonomy issues. Traditional names for these languages have been supplanted first by orientalists‘ prescriptions and then by their linguist heirs. Inaccurate terminology has sewn discord between speaker communities, disturbing the sociolinguistic landscape. This volume represents the state of the art of Gorani’s historical and socio-linguistics, documentation, and literature, as well as an effort to aid the „decolonization“ of Gorani linguistics.
Contents:
- Shuan Osman Karim & Saloumeh Gholami: Gorani in its historical and linguistic context
- Saeed Karami & Saloumeh Gholami: Examining the structural differences and similarities between literary Gorani and Hawrami through the lens of diglossiaby
- Parvin Mahmoudveysi: The Gūrānī variety of Bzɫāna and the literary language of Saydī
- Hamidreza Nikravesh: Judeo-Gūrānī: Tracing the emergence of a literary corpus
- Geoffrey Khan & Masoud Mohammadirad. Gorani influence on NENA
- Shuan Osman Karim: Pattern borrowing/convergence in the Southern Kurdish Zone
- Mohammad Rasekh-Mahand: The Laki of the Ahl-e Haqq community in Češin: Some morphosyntactic features
- Mahîr Dogan: Problems in Zazakî nomenclature
The aim of this paper is to look at some of the problems with the traditional subdivisions of Iranian and at possible new approaches. It builds on an argument made in Korn (2016a), adding discussion and further illustrating problems in the data and methods involved in the traditional model of relations among the Iranian languages. It specifically points out that the traditional family tree is based on a set of isoglosses that is an artefact of the data that happened to be available at the time. In addition, the question arises whether the wave model or the concept of linguistic areas would be more adequate to account for the data. The discovery of a corpus of Bactrian manuscripts encourages a new approach. I argue that a sub-branch including Bactrian, Parthian and some other languages is a hypothesis that deserves to be tested; at the same time, the comparison with other Iranian languages as well as typological considerations permit to assess the role of language contact.
Historical linguistic sources of Kurdish date back just a few hundred years, thus it is not possible to track the profound grammatical changes of Western Iranian languages in Kurdish. Through a comparison with attested languages of the Middle Iranian period, this paper provides a hypothetical chronology of grammatical changes. It allows us to tentatively localise the approximate time when modern varieties separated with regard to the respective grammatical change. In order to represent the types of linguistic relationship involved, distinct models of language contact and language continua are set up.
Pronominal clitics comprise one of the important traits of the majority of West Iranian languages. Nevertheless, while these person clitics have been the subject of virtually systematic studies in certain languages, e.g. Central Kurdish dialects, and Persian, they are hardly studied in the majority of languages where they are attested. More specifically, the existing scholarship has faintly dealt with the rise of procliticization, the development of person marking system, the placement of clitics, the cluster internal ordering of clitics, and the clitic-affix combinations. This study is an attempt to fill the lack of knowledge across the aspects mentioned. The development of proclitic attachment forms an integral part of the thesis.