Доклад Петера Схрейвера об исторической фонетике восточнокавказских языков на заседании Ностратического семинара им. В. М. Иллич-Свитыча

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Краткая аннотация доклада:

Unravelling the Historical Phonology of East Caucasian: Why bother?
 

The East Caucasian language family occupies a geographically small area, which it makes up for by its linguistic complexity, diversity and its many unusual grammatical features. This is reason enough to take the study of its history and the reconstruction of its grammar and lexicon seriously, but there are additional reasons that surpass the family itself, which will be addressed in the talk:

• The archaeogenetic study of the earliest speakers of the Indo-European language family has delivered spectacular results in recent years, which, at the present stage of knowledge, suggest an earliest origin of the family in Anatolia and a subsequent phase in the steppe area north of the Caucasus and the Black Sea. In the middle lies the Caucasus, whose languages and genetic history compared to Indo-European are heavily under-researched whilst potentially playing a crucial role in the debate.

• Among historical linguists it is nowadays almost the default theory that the introduction of agriculture in Europe from the ninth millennium BP onwards involved populations whose origin lies in Anatolia and who did *not* speak Indo-European. There is information available about the language family (or families) of those early populations, which gives rise to questions about their affiliation and to the question whether cognates survive somewhere among the Caucasian language families, as they do in the case of other language families:

• The Indo-European, Iranian and Turkic languages of the Caucasus represent residues of earlier linguistic maps in which the Caucasus formed part of a large spread zone of those language families, which later contracted, leaving isolated members in the Caucasus. These parallels suggest that it is worthwhile to ask oneself whether a similar situation may obtain for South Caucasian and North (= West + East) Caucasian. There is an indication that this is indeed the case for the latter, but the issue requires much more research.

These are big question, and East Caucasian is at its heart. The way to make progress is along the painstakingly slow but precise path of reconstructing its historical phonology, building on and refining the works of previous scholars, especially Nikolayev and Starostin’s A North Caucasian Etymological Dictionary (1994). First results of this endeavor will be presented, as well as work in progress, with a focus on the Tsezic subfamily of south-west Daghestan.