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.