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Comparison constructions in two Northern Talyshi dialects
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2023
Abstract
This article examines the comparison constructions in two Northern Talyshi varieties: in Anbarāni, used in the Islamic Republic of Iran; and the Northern Talyshi dialects spoken in the Republic of Azerbaijan. These constructions have been poorly studied in previous research dealing with this North-western Iranian language and this article aims to fill that gap. In contrast with a number of Western Iranian languages, Northern Talyshi (and the Talyshi language in general) does not have special morphological markers for expressing the degrees of comparison. The comparative grades are marked syntactically using various adpositions and function words. Having long been under the influence of neighbouring languages such as Persian and Azerbaijani, both Anbarāni and the Talyshi dialects spoken in the present-day Republic of Azerbaijan have been affected by these languages at some level in the ways to make comparison.
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Footnotes
In memory of Zinaida Tabakyan
References
1 In my transcription of Northern Talyshi here, I almost entirely follow the transliteration system used by Wolfgang Schulze in his work Northern Talysh (Schulze, W., Northern Talysh (Muenchen, 2000)Google Scholar). It is worth noting that the symbols a and ā differ in quality rather than in length and denote front and back open vowels, respectively. The NT ə is a mid-high central vowel that should not be confused with the front a in Azerbaijani (and NT texts written in the Latin Azerbaijani alphabet) denoted by the same symbol. The other letters used here have their usual values (č = ç, ğ = ğ, x = x, š = ş, ž = j). The only difference between the system employed here and Schulze's work is that I use j as the Latin Azerbaijani c [dʒ], whereas Schulze represents it as ǯ.
2 Asatrian, G. and Borjian, H., ‘Talish and the Talishis (the state of research)’, Iran and the Caucasus 9.1 (2005), p. 43Google Scholar.
3 Clifton, J. et al., Sociolinguistic Situation of the Talysh in Azerbaijan (SIL International, 2005), p. 3Google Scholar.
4 See Bazin, M., Le Tâlech: Une Region Ethnique au Nord de l'Iran, tome 2 (Paris, 1980)Google Scholar; Stilo, D., ‘The Tati language group in the sociolinguistic context of Northwestern Iran and Transcaucasia’, Iranian Studies 14.3–4 (1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yarshater, E., ‘The Taleshi of Asālem’, Studia Iranica 25.1 (1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 D. Paul, ‘A comparative dialectal description of Iranian Taleshi’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Manchester, 2011), p. 18.
6 Pireyko, L., ‘Talyšskij jazyk. Dialekty Tati Irana’, in Osnovy iranskogo jazykoznanija: Novoiranskie jazyki: severo-zapadnaja gruppa, (eds.) Vasily Abaev, Mikhail Bogolyubov, and Vera Rastorgueva (Moscow, 1991), p. 91Google Scholar.
7 See Pireyko, L., Talyšsko-russkij slovar’ (Moscow, 1976), p. 351Google Scholar.
8 Bazin describes the population of Anbarān as bilingual, gradually becoming trilingual: ‘Nowadays, all this Ṭāleš population is bilingual, speaking both ṭāleši and Turkish, and increasingly becoming trilingual by using Persian as well’ (M. Bazin, ‘ANBARĀN’, Encyclopædia Iranica, online edition, 2012, available at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/anbaran (accessed 24 October 2023)).
9 Stassen, L., Comparative and Universal Grammar (Oxford, 1985), p. 24Google Scholar.
10 Treis, Y., ‘Comparative construction: an introduction’, in On the Expression of Comparison: Contributions to the Typology of Comparative Constructions from Lesser-Known Languages, Special Issue of Linguistic Discovery 16.1 (2018), p. iiiGoogle Scholar.
11 Dixon, R. M. W., Basic Linguistic Theory, vol. 3: Further Grammatical Topics (Oxford, 2012), p. 344Google Scholar.
12 For equatives and similatives, adopting the terminology used by Haspelmath et al., mark is replaced by standard-marker.
13 The Anbarān region consists of two rural districts (dehestān): the dehestān of Anbarān, which includes the villages of Anbarān-e Olyā, Qeshlāq-e Pelāzir, and Qeshlāq-e Sarābād, and the dehestān of Minābād, consisting of the villages of Jeyd, Kalash, Mirzānaq, and Minābād. The Anbarān region has a town under the same name, which was created in 1998 by uniting the villages of Anbarān-e Soflā and Aminjān (see Bazin, ‘ANBARĀN’). It should be noted that under the term ‘Anbarāni’, the Northern Talyshi dialect spoken throughout the Anbarān region is considered; however, this dialect itself includes a number of subdialects, which have some slight differences in terms of both phonology and grammar. This article is mainly based on the dialect of the former village of Aminjān, but the subdialects of other villages in the region have also been studied.
14 Stilo, ‘Tati language group’, pp. 138–41.
15 D. Stilo, ‘Two sets of mobile verbal person agreement markers in the Northern Talyshi language’, in Aspects of Iranian Linguistics, (eds.) Simin Karimi, Donald Stilo, and Vida Samiian (Newcastle, 2008), p. 364.
16 Pireyko, Talyšsko-russkij slovar’, p. 25, Pireyko, ‘Talyšskij jazyk’, p. 127; G. Windfuhr, ‘Cases’, in Encyclopædia Iranica, vol. 5 (Costa Mesa, 1992), p. 29.
17 B. Miller, Talyšskij jazyk (Moscow, 1953), p. 88.
18 Schulze, Northern Talysh, p. 17.
19 B. Miller (Talyšskij jazyk, p. 79) claims that the oblique case ending derives from Old Persian demonstrative particle hya. According to W. Schulze (Northern Talysh, p. 17), it corresponds to Old Persian -ahyā (genitive singular of a-stems), which in turn derives from Old Iranian case ending *-ahya (Windfuhr, ‘Cases’, p. 29).
20 In AnbTal, the postpositions ku and sa are used with personal pronouns and can attach either to the oblique forms (for 1SG and 3SG, e.g. mānəsa ‘on me’, avəku ‘from him/her’) or to direct forms (amaku ‘from us’, avonsa ‘on them’). In AzTal, however, these postpositions do not attach to personal pronouns, but instead attach to possessive pronouns (e.g. čəməku ‘from me’, əštəsa ‘on you’, čavonku ‘from them’, čaysa ‘on him/her’, etc.).
21 D. Paul, following Dixon, calls them ‘case clitics’ (for more details, see Paul, ‘Comparative dialectal description’, p. 158).
22 B. Miller suggests that the second singular and plural forms of possessive pronouns are also fused forms of čə and personal pronouns (əštə < čə + tə, šəma < čə + šəma). In the case of the second plural, the articulatory proximity of š and č has caused the latter to become inaudible (Miller, Talyšskij jazyk, p. 115).
23 For detailed information on the morphology of the verb in Northern Talyshi and especially the distribution of stem forms over the verb paradigm, see S. Kaye, ‘Morphomic stems in the Northern Talyshi verb: diachrony and synchrony’, in The Boundaries of Pure Morphology, (eds.) Silvio Cruschina, Martin Maiden, and John Charles Smith (Oxford, 2013), pp. 181–208.
24 See Stilo, ‘Two sets’.
25 See Paul, ‘Comparative dialectal description’, chapter 4.
26 Schulze, Northern Talysh, p. 98.
27 For information on the ergativity in Iranian languages in general and the course of its historical changes, see L. Pireyko, Osnovnye voprosy ergativnosti na material indoiranskyx jazykov (Moscow, 1968); T. Jügel, Die Entwicklung Der Ergativkonstruktion Im Alt- Und Mitteliranischen: Eine Korpusbasierte Untersuchung Zu Kasus, Kongruenz Und Satzbau: 21 (Iranica) (Wiesbaden, 2015); B. Scheucher, ‘Ergativity in new West Iranian’, in Essays on Typology of Iranian Languages, (eds.) Alireza Korangy and Behrooz Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari (Berlin/Boston, 2019).
28 R. M. W. Dixon, Ergativity (Cambridge, 1994), p. 1.
29 See Scheucher, ‘Ergativity in New West Iranian’, p. 6.
30 The NT enclitic pronouns are: 1SG. -əm, 2SG. -ə (AzTal)/-e/-ə (AnbTal), 3SG. -əš, 1PL. -əmon (AzTal)/-əmun (AnbTal), 2PL. -on (AzTal)/-en (AnbTal), 3PL. -əšon (AzTal)/-əšun (AnbTal). For more details about the functions of the enclitic pronouns, see H. Avchyan, ‘Enclitic pronouns in the Anbarāni dialect of Talyshi’, Bulletin of the Institute of Oriental Studies, 2.1 (2022), pp. 129–35.
31 When the adjective ends with a vowel, the attributive marker is usually omitted, e.g. gada ka ‘small house’, siyu mašu (AnbTal)/siyo mašo (AzTal) ‘black shoe’, etc. Adjectives ending with -i normally take the suffix -a, e.g. gadalia zua (AnbTal)/gadalia zoa (AzTal) ‘little boy’, ruania gužd ‘fatty meat’, etc.
32 The postposition sa ‘on, on top of’ has a nominal origin; it derives from the noun sa ‘head’ (< OIr. *sarah-). In both AnbTal and AzTal, besides its role as a postposition, it is used as a noun.
33 According to B. Miller, the postposition ku ‘from’ has a nominal origin from the noun ku ‘place’ (Miller, Talyšskij jazyk, p. 78). Daniel Paul states that in AzTal, ku ‘has word-level status as a nominal meaning “place,” in addition to its role as a postposition’ (Paul, ‘Comparative dialectal description’, p. 158), but I have never come across such a usage of this word nor do any of the main dictionaries of Northern Talyshi define ku as ‘place’ (F. Aboszoda, English-Talishi Dictionary (Muenchen, 2012); Pireyko, Talyšsko-russkij slovar’; F. Aboszoda, Russko-talyšskij slovar’ (Muenchen, 2012); B. Miller, Talyšskie teksty (Moscow, 1930)).
34 The preposition čə goes back to OIr. *hačā- ‘from’ (> New Persian az) (V. Rastorgueva and D. Edelman, Ėtimologičeskij slovar’ iranskix jazykov (Moscow, 2007), p. 301). This preposition is frequently used in AzTal, whereas its usage in AnbTal is sporadic. In fact, it is not even mentioned in the works dedicated to Iranian Talyshi, including Anbarāni (Paul, ‘Comparative dialectal description’; R. Amiriān-Budālālu, Guyeš-e Tāleši-ye Anbarān-e Ardabil [Talyshi dialect of Anbarān of Ardabil] (Hashtpar, 2005).
35 The postposition ada (AzTal) derives from OIr. *antar ‘in, among’ (> New Persian dar). The corresponding form in AnbTal is anda ‘in, with’, but it is not used in the constructions of comparison.
36 Miller, Talyšskij jazyk, p. 73.
37 In Anbarāni, the Persian comparative suffix -tar is very rarely used as the index of the normal comparative construction, when the standard and the mark are present. In my text corpus, it is found only once in the following sentence:
38 In the Persian language, when two items are being compared, the suffix -tar is affixed to an adjective in the predicate position, and the word az ‘from’ follows the item being compared and precedes the standard of comparison (see Shahrzad Mahootian, Persian (London/New York, 1997), p. 260). Examples (17), (18), and (19) translated into Persian would respectively be:
39 The verb pie ‘to love’ and ‘to want’ holds a special place in the verbal system of Northern Talyshi, showing an ergative pattern throughout its paradigm (see H. Avchyan, ‘A short story of Mullah Nasreddin in the Anbarāni dialect of the Talyshi language: text, translation, glossary and comments’, Bulletin of the Institute of Oriental Studies, 1.2 (2021), pp. 220–21).
40 In fact, this sentence is ambiguous. It can be translated either as ‘I love Maryam more than Žale (loves Maryam)’ or ‘I love Maryam more than (I love) Žale’. In some languages, such ambiguity arises because comparatives allow ellipsis of a repeated element, and it can be eliminated by restoring the missing elements, e.g. in English, the ambiguous sentence ‘I love you more than Ana’ can be paraphrased as ‘I love you more than Ana loves you’ or ‘I love you more than I love Ana’ (see Dixon, Basic Linguistic Theory, p. 368). In Northern Talyshi, paraphrasing this sentence is impossible, thus the meaning of the sentence has to be understood from the context.
41 Treis, ‘Comparative construction’, pp. vi–vii.
42 Dixon, Basic Linguistic Theory, pp. 343–75.
43 Ibid., p. 366.
44 Stassen, Comparative and Universal Grammar, pp. 24–52.
45 Ibid., p. 27.
46 Ibid., p. 41.
47 Treis, ‘Comparative construction’, p. x.
48 This sentence literally says ‘Tehran is a big[ger] city than all [cities] of Iran’. In this type of superlative construction, the words indicating a place can either be in the oblique case or marked by the postposition ada/anda ‘in’ (as in example (35)).
49 The only example in which the standard in the superlative construction is marked by the postposition ada is given by Pireyko (Talyšsko-russkij slovar’, p. 326):
50 Treis, ‘Comparative construction’, p. xii.
51 In Azerbaijani, the superlative is formed by placing the superlative word an ‘most’ before the adjectives. Examples (42) and (43) translated into Azerbaijani would respectively be (Latin Azerbaijani alphabet used):
52 Miller describes only one way to express the superlative in Northern Talyshi—the intensifier superlative discussed here further: ‘Only the descriptive method is used to express the superlative degree, the highest degree of any feature or quality – that is to put the adverbs ve “very” or xayli “a lot” before the adjective’ (Miller, Talyšskij jazyk, p. 73). He does not, however, provide any examples.
53 Pireyko mentions two ways for expressing the superlatives; the first is the intensifier superlative as described by Miller and the second is the absolute comparison superlative with the pronoun hamma/hammay ‘all, everybody’ (Pireyko, ‘Talyšskij jazyk’, p. 131). Meanwhile, Schulze does not discuss the superlative (Schulze, Northern Talysh, p. 19).
54 In the Persian language, when contrasting more than two different items, or the same item from more than two perspectives, the suffix -tarin is used. Superlative adjectives are attributive and precede the noun (Mahootian, Persian, pp. 260–61). Examples (44) and (45) translated into Persian would respectively be:
55 M. Gorshenin, ‘The crosslinguistics of the superlative’, in Neues aus der Bremer Linguistikwerkstatt: Aktuelle Themen und Projekte, vol. 31, (ed.) Cornelia Stroh (Bochum, 2012), pp. 65–88.
56 Treis, ‘Comparative construction’, p. xi.
57 Ibid., p. xii.
58 Ibid.
59 See Haspelmath, M. and Buchholz, O., ‘Equative and similative constructions in the languages of Europe’, in Adverbial Constructions in the Languages of Europe, (ed.) van der Auwera, Johan (Berlin, 1998), pp. 298–301Google Scholar.
60 This word of Arabic origin also exists in Persian as qadr but, clearly, in both AnbTal and AzTal, it is an indirect Arabic loanword with a Turkic source as intermediary, cf. Az. qədər, Tr. kadar ‘extent, quantity’, also functioning as ‘as, as much as’.
61 Rett, J., ‘Similatives and the argument structure of verbs’, Nat Lang Linguist Theory, 31.November (2013), p. 1125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
62 Haspelmath and Buchholz, ‘Equative and similative constructions’, p. 309.
63 Ibid., p. 290.
64 Haspelmath, M. et al., ‘Equative constructions in world-wide perspective: a crosslinguistic perspective’, in Similative and Equative Constructions: A Cross-linguistic Perspective, (eds.) Treis, Yvonne and Vanhove, Martine (Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2017), pp. 14–15Google Scholar.
65 Haspelmath and Buchholz, ‘Equative and similative constructions’, p. 278.
66 Avchyan, H. and Voskanian, V., Tališereni dasagirk (Yerevan, 2022)Google Scholar.