A grammar of Iranian Armenian: Parskahayeren or Iranahayeren

Hossep Dolatian, Afsheen Sharifzadeh, Bert Vaux

Keywords:

armenian, iran, descriptive, grammar, fieldwork

Synopsis

Iranian Armenian is the variety of spoken Armenian that was developed by Armenians in Tehran, Iran over the last few centuries. It has a substantial community of speakers in California. This variety or lect is called “Persian Armenian” [pɒɻskɒhɒjeɻen] or “Iranian Armenian” [iɻɒnɒhɒjeɻen] by members of the community. The present book is not a comprehensive grammar of the language. It occupies a gray zone between being a simple sketch versus a sizable grammar. We attempt to clarify the basic aspects of the language, such as its phoneme inventory, noticeable morphophonological processes, various inflectional paradigms, and some peculiar aspects of its syntax. We likewise provide a sample text of Iranian Armenian speech.

Many aspects of this variety seem to be identical to Standard Eastern Armenian (SEA), so we tried to focus more on those aspects of Iranian Armenian which differ from SEA. The phonology has developed new phonemes and intonational contours due to contact with Persian. The morphophonology has grammaticalized allomorphic patterns that are phonosyntactic, meaning they reference syntactic information. Nominal morphology is largely identical to SEA but with some simplification of irregular processes. Verbal morphology is similar to SEA, but with major innovations in the aorist paradigm. The aorist or past perfective paradigm has undergone a change whereby irregular patterns have been reanalyzed as regular patterns. The syntax is largely the same as SEA, but with innovations due to contact with Persian, such as object clitics and the use of resumptive pronouns.

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Biographies

Hossep Dolatian, Stony Brook University

Hossep Dolatian is a visiting scholar at Stony Brook University. He completed his PhD at Stony Brook university with a focus on Armenian morphophonology and mathematical linguistics. His main interest is the descriptive and theoretical documentation of Armenian, with a focus on lexical phonology and other areas of the morphology-phonology interface.

Afsheen Sharifzadeh

Afsheen Sharifzadeh, MD is a medical doctor at University of Massachusetts Medical Center. His interests include sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and language contact with a focus on Inner Asia and the Caucasus. He also enjoys studying the intersectionality between language, culture and identity among historic diasporas, such as the Iranian Armenians, by visiting speech communities and documenting their languages and social attitudes towards their histories and host societies.

Bert Vaux, University of Cambridge

Bert Vaux (PhD Harvard, 1994) is Professor of Phonology and Morphology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow in Linguistics at King’s College, Cambridge. He is primarily interested in phenomena that shed light on the structure and origins of the phonological component of grammar, especially in the realms of psychophonology, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics. He also enjoys working with native speakers to document endangered languages, especially dialects of Armenian, Abkhaz, and English.

book cover

Published

May 22, 2023
LaTeX source on GitHub

Online ISSN

2699-0156

Print ISSN

2699-0148
Cite as
Dolatian, Hossep, Sharifzadeh, Afsheen & Vaux, Bert. 2023. A grammar of Iranian Armenian: Parskahayeren or Iranahayeren . (Languages of the Caucasus 3). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.8177018

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Details about the available publication format: PDF

PDF

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-96110-419-2

doi

10.5281/zenodo.8177018

Details about the available publication format: Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-98554-077-8

Physical Dimensions

180mm x 245mm