The origin of ergativity in Sumerian, and the'inversion'in pronominal agreement: a historical explanation based on Neo-Aramaic parallels (original) (raw)
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A HISTORY OF THE PASSIVE IN PRE-MODERN ARAMAIC: AN OUTLINE
JSS, 2022
In Proto-Aramaic, the passive of transitive verbs belonging to all three principal stems-G, D and C-was formed internally. Some verbs of the G-and D-stems also possessed detransitive derivatives. Transitive verbs of the G-, D-and C-stems lost their internal passives early on, and the passives of G-and D-verbs were encoded by their respective t-stems. Against this general Aramaic picture, in Imperial Aramaic the passive forms of the G-stem were in complementary distribution: the passive Past was encoded by the internal passive of the Suffix Conjugation (Gp SC), while the passive non-Past was rendered by the Gt participle and the Gt Prefix Conjugation. Gp SC stopped being used with Imperial Aramaic once it was replaced, as a written language, by vernacular-based literary varieties. The Ct-stem, non-existent in Imperial Aramaic, must have first emerged among spoken varieties of Aramaic in the first half of the first millennium BCE, and only within I-w and II-w/y roots. Within the Imperial Aramaic corpus, both the rare Gt SC passive forms and Ct-stem forms reflect the influence of spoken Aramaic varieties in the diglossic situation. In Syriac, the Ct-stem of sound roots is unattested during its golden age. The Ct-forms of sound roots appeared in original Syriac texts only after the Arab conquest, and these also come from spoken Aramaic varieties.
From book-jacket: This book traces the changes in argument alignment that have taken place in Aramaic during its 3000-year documented history. Eastern Aramaic dialects first developed tense-conditioned ergative alignment in the perfect, which later developed into a past perfective. However, while some modern dialects preserve a degree of ergative alignment, it has been eroded by movement towards semantic/Split-S alignment and by the use of separate marking for the patient, and some dialects have lost ergative alignment altogether. Thus an entire cycle of alignment change can be traced, something which had previously been considered unlikely. Eleanor Coghill examines evidence from ancient Aramaic texts, recent dialectal documentation, and cross-linguistic parallels to provide an account o f the pathways through which these alignment changes took place. She argues that what became the ergative construction was originally limited mostly to verbs with an experiencer role, such as ‘see’ and ‘hear’, which could encode the experiencer with a dative. While this dative-experiencer scenario shows some formal similarities with other proposed explanations for alignment change, the data analysed in this book show that it is clearly distinct. The book draws important theoretical conclusions on the development of tense-conditioned alignment cross-linguistically, and provides a valuable basis for further research.
The Sumerian 2nd person pronoun, and Latin and French morphophonemics
Geregory Chambon et al. (eds.), De l'argile au numérique. Mélanges assyriologiques en l'honneur de Dominique Charpinr, 2019
The realization that morphophonemic changes known from living languages were operative in Sumerian as well has important implications for understanding the phonology and morphology of this dead language. In light of comparative evidence it is likely, for instance, that the 2nd person agent/object marker of Sumerian, appearing in Late Sumerian as /e/ and in earlier texts as a long vowel, actually is the same pronominal element [s] that was realized as /r/ in the dative infix of the verb and as /z/ in the personal and possessive pronoun. There are other cases of morphophonemic change in the nominal and verbal inflexion of Sumerian, which are briefly discussed and interpreted phonologically in the light of comparative linguistic evidence, and their relevance for the understanding of Sumerian phonology and grammar is tentatively outlined.