On the historical phonology of Ossetic: the origin of the oblique case suffix.

• Author: Kim, Ronald

1. THE PROBLEM: PROTO-OSSETIC OBLIQUE *-I

   Ossetic is spoken by approximately half a million inhabitants of the autonomous Republic of North Ossetia-Alania in the Russian Federation and the former autonomous region of South Ossetia in Georgia, as well as adjoining regions of the central Caucasus and emigrant communities in cities such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Tbilisi. (1) The language belongs to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European family and is the sole surviving descendant of the Northeast Iranian dialects of the ancient Scythians and Sarmatians and medieval Alans, who dominated the Eurasian steppe between the Danube delta and Central Asia from the first millennium B.C. until the early Middle Ages. Despite having undergone numerous idiosyncratic developments--and influence from neighboring Caucasian and Turkic languages--Ossetic preserves many startling archaisms in its phonology and morphology, due in part to its isolation from the rest of the Iranian-speaking world for some thousand years.

   Among the modern Iranian languages, Ossetic is distinguished by its complex system of nominal case inflection, exemplified by the following paradigms for baex "horse" in the two major dialects, Digor (D) and Iron (I): (2)

   Digor pl. Iron nominative boex boex-toe boex genitive boex-i boex-t-i boex-y dative boex-oen boex-t-oen boex-oen allative boex-moe boex-toe-moe boex-moe ablative boex-aej boex-t-oej boex-aej inessive boex-i boex-t-i boex-y adessive boex-boel boex-toe-boel boex-yl comitative (boexi xoeccoe) (boexti xoeccoe) boex-imoe equative boex-au boex-t-au boex-au pl. nominative boaex-t-oe genitive boex-t-y dative boex-t-oen allative boex-toe-m ablative boex-t-oej inessive boex-t-y adessive boex-t-yl comitative boex-t-imoe equative boex-t-au The "genitive" is also used to mark definite (direct) objects and is found in a variety of other argument and locatival roles, as a result of which it is often referred to as the oblique. The comitative, expressing accompaniment ("with a horse"), is found only in Iron; in its place, Digor uses gen. -i followed by the postposition xoeccoe. (3)

   Although a century has passed since the appearance of Miller's pioneering historical grammar of Ossetic in 1903, disagreement persists as to the origin of several of these case markers. To be sure, all scholars derive adess. D -boel (reduced to -yl in Iron) from postposed PIr. *upari "on, above, at" (Av. upairi, OP upariy, Skt. upari, Miller 1903: 46-47, Bailey 1945: 6, Thordarson 1989a: 471); and Weber (1980: 133) is probably correct to compare dat. D, I -oen with similar medieval and modern Northeast Iranian endings, namely Khotanese a-stem instr. sg. -ina, -ana or obl. sg. Yidgha -[??]n, Munji -an, abl./gen, sg. Waxi -[??]n

   Miller (1903: 43-44) derives D -i, I -y

   More recently, Bielmeier (1982: 59, 66-67) takes the Ossetic gen./iness, from the PIr. gen. sg. *-ah of consonant-stems. This hypothesis, however, is directly contradicted by the zero-ending of most nouns in both dialects, which can hardly reflect anything other than PIr. a-stem nom. sg. *-ah. Similarly, Thordarson (1989a: 459, 470) sees in this ending a merger of gen. sg. *-ah and loc. sg. *-ya of PIr. root nouns, whereas abl. -oej goes back to a-stem gen./abl. *-ayah (or a conflation of *-ayah and instr. *-aya; 1989a: 459, 471).

   That the archaic PIr. root-noun or consonant-stem inflection would have ousted that of the rapidly expanding a- and a-stems in the prehistory of Ossetic is a priori improbable. A more serious defect of these explanations, however, is their arbitrary appeal to, and selection from, the rich variety of PIr. declensions and case endings. (7) Although the extension of an original, say, genitive or instrumental ending to a general "oblique" does find parallels in the historical development of other IE languages. (8) Bielmeier and Thordarson fail to explain why these particular cases of particular stem classes were generalized to all nouns. Moreover, they do not specify what happened to the rest of the Old Iranian case system. Did the other case endings simply disappear without a trace? Through what stages did pre-Ossetic pass between the reconstructed PIr. system of eight cases and the very different modern Ossetic agglutinative system of eight cases (nine in Iron)?

   As Testen (1996: 370-72) rightly emphasizes, one must take into account the diachronic evolution of the morphology of the language as a whole. In his brief discussion of the prehistory of Ossetic nominal inflection, Testen argues that the reconstructed PIE, PInIr., and PIr. inflectional system of eight cases was drastically reduced in pre-POss, to two cases, unmarked nominative or "direct" *-[??] and oblique *-i, a situation preserved in contemporary Yaghnobi (see section 2). (9) The subsequent buildup of "secondary" cases through grammaticalization of postpositions left the bare obl. *-i confined to the functions of definite direct object, genitive, and inessive (locative).

   This hypothesis accounts for the primary role of the genitive/inessive within the Ossetic case system and the relatively wide variety of theta- and locatival roles which it can express. In support of this view, Testen refers to the clitic forms of personal pronouns, in which the former pre-POss, general oblique clitic survives in the unmarked, unsuffixed gen./abl./iness. 1sg. moe, 2sg. doe, 1 pl. noe, 2pl. uoe, 3 pl. soe. (10) As for the abl., Testen prefers to derive -oej from postposed PIr. *haca (1996: 370 n. 18), comparing the OP abl. construction haca-ma "from me" (with secondary enclitic -ma vs. tonic Av. mat, Ved. mat; 1996: 362 n. 8). (11)

   In the following, I approach the question of the origin of pre-POss, obl. *-i by comparing the prehistory of oblique case endings in the closest attested East Iranian relatives of Ossetic. Specifically, Sims-Williams's (1982) analysis of the origin of obl. -i in Sogdian--the lingua franca of trade along the Silk Road in medieval Central Asia before the Islamic conquest, and a vehicle of Buddhist, Manichaean, and Nestorian Christian literature--suggests that a similar sequence of phonological developments may have produced obl. *-i in Ossetic as well (see section 2). The resemblance between the stress patterns reconstructed for Proto-Ossetic and Sogdian suggests that the two languages shared in the same prehistoric stress shift or reassignment (see section 3). The relative chronology of the pre-POss, stress shift and other sound changes, based mostly on internal reconstruction, leads to the conclusion that the oblique ending is a common innovation of Ossetic and Sogdian (see section 4). The ensuing implications for medieval and modern Northeast Iranian dialectology are briefly discussed in section 5.

2. SOGDIAN-I AND YAGHNOBI-I

   In his pioneering study of East Iranian nominal inflection, Tedesco (1926: 102; cf. 1923: 314) proposed that the synchronic facts of Sogdian reveal the earlier operation of a "Rhythmic Law" (Rhythmusgesetz), which divided all nouns, adjectives, and verbs into two types of stems, "light" and "heavy": the former preserve distinct reflexes of numerous OIr. inflectional endings which have been merged or lost in the latter. Citing as a parallel the distribution of stress in Iron Ossetic (on which see section 3 below), Gershevitch (1948: 62-63) proposed that the Rhythmic Law was connected to the placement of stress in pre-Sogdian: "words kept or lost their vocalic endings according as the endings were stressed or unstressed."

   Sims-Williams (1984) has refined the statement of the Rhythmic Law as follows: Syllables containing a long vowel or diphthong, including /Vr/ and /Vm/, are "heavy," while all other syllables are "light." (12) At some point in the prehistory of Sogdian, surface stress came to lie on the first heavy syllable in the (phonological) word; if there were no heavy syllables, stress fell on the final syllable. Stems containing at least one heavy syllable are referred to as "heavy"; those which consist solely of light syllables are "light."

   This shift, a purely phonological phenomenon, was followed by a number of stress-conditioned developments which profoundly affected the inflectional morphology and morphosyntax of the language. Consider the parallel declensions of two masculine a-stems, light ram- "people" and heavy me[??] "city," and two feminine a-stems, light wan- "tree" and heavy zwan "life." (13) Note that the Sogdian plural is regularly formed with the originally collective suffix *-ta and so takes singular a-stem endings. (14)

   light masc. ram- "people" pl. nom. ram-i i. Cf. light ([??])kt-ya "deed, action"

   This last sound change provides the key to the origin of Sogdian oblique -i. The contrasting reflexes of the PIr. nominal case endings may be derived from the following relative chronology of pre-Sogdian sound changes:

   (1) Auslautgesetze: *-ah > *-i, *-am > *-u, *-a(h) > *-a;

   (2) syncope of (certain) unstressed vowels;

   (3) unstressed *-ya > *-i, *-wa > *-u;

   (4) loss of "suffixal" *k after unstressed *~ in sequences of *-~kV, with contraction of vowels across the resulting hiatus;

   (5) apocope of unstressed word-final short vowels, syncope of unstressed word-initial and -medial short vowels, shortening of posttonic long vowels (and loss word-medially; cf. Gershevitch 1954: [section] 889, Sims-Williams 1984: 203-4), and variable introduction of prothetic and epenthetic vowels. (17)

   Thus -i after heavy stems continues PIr. endings of the form *-aya(h) via the sequence of developments *'-aya > *'-ya (2) > -i (3). This ending, then, was originally proper to the loc. of the masc. sg. (

   Phonological developments in unstressed final syllables thereby resulted in a complex and synchronically opaque distribution of -[??] vs. -i in heavy stems, illustrated above by the paradigms of masculine me[??] and feminine zwan. This distribution has been almost fully preserved in the archaic Christian ms. C2, as demonstrated by...