In search for a new model: Iranian Isoglosses revisited

International audienceThis paper looks at isoglosses transcending the traditional subdivisions of the Iranian branch of Indo-European. It will discuss how to account for the data uncovered by recent discoveries and research, and will look at the relation of inherited features and those caused by language contact. The subdivisions of the Iranian branch of Indo-European have been established roughly a century ago, at a time when many Middle an New Iranian where only fragmentarily documented, if at all. This subdivision has become questionable by new data from Middle and New Iranian languages. First, Eastern Iranian has been shown not to be a genetic entity, and its ancestor language inexistent: "it does not seem possible to regard the Eastern Iranian group as a whole—even disregarding Parachi and Ormuri—as a genetic grouping. Such a conception would imply the existence of an ancestral "proto-Eastern Iranian" intermediate between "common Iranian" and the attested Eastern Iranian languages; but if one reconstructs "proto-Eastern Iranian" in such a way as to account for all the features of the group, it proves to be identical to the "common Iranian" reconstructible as the ancestor of the whole Iranian family." (SIMS-WILLIAMS 1996:651b) Similarly, the dichotomy of Western Iranian has proven untenable because the isoglosses do not yield a two-way distinction once one adds some data from New Iranian languages. In addition to new data that make subdivisions questionable, there are also methodological problems with the inventories of isoglosses used so far for the subgrouping of Iranian. The subdivision of Western Iranian is based on TEDESCO 1921, whose aim was to distinguish the “dialects” in the Middle Iranian Manichean texts found in Chinese Turkestan; his list of differences between what is now known as Middle Persian and Parthian continues to be used to distinguish a Northern and a Southern subbranch of Western Iranian. This use of TEDESCO’s isoglosses implies three misunderstandings: • every difference between Persian and Parthian is good as an isogloss; • features for which Persian and Parthian agree are per definitionem not an isogloss; • agreement of Persian and Parthian is indicative for all of Western Iranian. None of these premises is tenable. For instance, the development of Proto-Iranian vocalic r (*ṛ) has not been used as an isogloss since Parthian and Middle Persian show the same result (ir in neutral context, e.g. kird “done”, tirs “fear”); this result has often been viewed as the result for all of Western Iranian. However, New Iranian languages suggest otherwise: Balochi shows kurt, turs (and Gilaki might show the same result: kud), and Zazaki has /ar/ (written er in contemporary orthography: kerd, ters), similarly maybe also in (some varities of?) Talyshi (kard). This clearly excludes that the development seen in Middle Western Iranian applies to the whole group. This difference, small though it may seem, appears to be an important isogloss: as soon as *ṛ has yielded ir, ur or ar, this sequence is indistinguishable from old sequences of vowel plus r and the development is a “point of no return” in establishing a dialect group, dividing Middle Persian plus Parthian from other Western Iranian languages. Another problem with TEDESCO’s approach is that he considers shared innovations as less relavant because they “can always be independent of each other and only parallel” (TEDESCO 1921:246). Although an accidental parallel development is of course impossible to exclude, the probability of this being the case depends on whether or not it is a typologically marked development. Indeed, shared morphological innovation are considered as particularly importan by others: “It is now generally agreed among linguists that the most certain sub-groups are constructed on the basis of unique shared morphological innovations” (CLACKSON 2007:5). According to this view, shared morphological innovations permit the establishment of a subbranch and the reconstruction of a common ancestor intermediate between the individual languages and the protolanguage. This sheds an interesting light on Bactrian, which shares a number of features with Parthian, in spite of its being regarded as Eastern Iranian. The most noteworthy of these are an optative 3PL composed of the 3PL indicative to which the 3SG optative ending is affixed and a imperfect in -āz the etymology of which is not clear, but it seems to be a combination of a fossilised verb form with a particle. In view of CLACKSON’s view cited above, this group of shared innovations (to which other shared features might be added) would permit the reconstruction of a subbranch containing at least Parthian and Bactrian.On the other hand, Bactrian also shares a number of features with other Eastern Iranian languages. The number of shared morphological innovations appears to be smaller than those shared with Parthian, but a noteworthy one is the pronoun of the 2PL, being composed of the 2SG pronoun to which the 1PL pronoun is suffixed (thus “youSG -we”), which Bactrian shares with some Pamir languages. It seems impossible to include the Pamir languages (which are unlikely to be a genetic unity) in the same subbranch; that branch would also risk to cover all of Iranian. The question to be discussed is, thus, whether morphological innovations could also be the result of language contact. Indeed, FRIEDMAN (2000), reviewing the Balkan languages, the classical case of a linguistic area, maintains that grammatical features are “key to the concept of areal linguistics – as opposed to typological or genetic linguistics”. I will argue that the relations among Iranian languages need to be reevaluated in the light of the interaction of inherited features and those caused by language contact. It needs to be investigated which features can possibly or plausibly caused by language contact; at the same time, the features that are likely to be inherited need to be accomodated. Clearly, new models are needed to account for data not included in the classical studies on the subgroupings of Iranian. 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