Ossetian diachronics

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Frislander
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Ossetian diachronics

Post by Frislander »

This may have been asked before, but does anyone have any good sources/papers on Ossetian diachronic phonology, particulaly with regards to the development of ejectives. I just want to incorporate something on that in an essay I'm writing on language contact but I haven't been able to find any good sources, at least in English (all the more reason I should start learning Russian I guess).
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Re: Ossetian diachronics

Post by Nortaneous »

My impression is that the only source of ejectives in Ossetian is loaning -- not just from Caucasian languages with ejectives, but also from Russian, where plosive MOA is not reliably preserved in the loaning process and sometimes plain unvoiced stops end up as voiced or ejective, e.g. bulk'on < polkovnik.
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Re: Ossetian diachronics

Post by Tropylium »

The Ossetian chapter in Compendium Linguarum Iranicarum has a brief outline. On ejectives in particular:
Fridrik Thordarson wrote:4.2.5.2.2.3 The glottalics (ejectives; p' etc.) have penetrated into Ossetic from the adjacent
Caucasian languages. They are frequent in loanwords: I. k'uɨri, D. k'uære "week" < Georg.
k'vira "id., Sunday".
In Russian loanwords the unvoiced stops and affricates seem as a rule to be rendered by
their homorganic glottalic counterparts, although this is not always shown by the orthogra-
phy: p'alet (thus written) "épaulette" < Russ. èpolet; p'arti (written parti) "party" < Russ. partija.
In a few Iranian words glottalics represent ancient voiceless stops; this is especially
the case after s: I. xuɨsk' (D. xuskat) "dry", cf. Av. huska-; I. st'alɨ, D. (æ)st'alu "star", cf. Av. star-.
There is some fluctuation between the glottalics and their non-glottalized (voiced, voice-
less) counterparts; to a certain extent the variation is dialectal: I. ʒix, D. ʒux or c'ux
"mouth" (loanword); I. færsk, D. færsk'æ "rib" (cf. fars "side").
In contradistinction to the Caucasian languages, the functional load of the glottalization is
insignificant. While, e.g., in Georgian minimal pairs of the type p'uri "bread" : puri "cow"
are easily found, such oppositions are rare in Ossetic.
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Re: Ossetian diachronics

Post by Salmoneus »

Something conlangers don't do enough of, I think: contrasts that are relatively unimportant, with low functional load.
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Re: Ossetian diachronics

Post by Pabappa »

Salmoneus wrote:Something conlangers don't do enough of, I think: contrasts that are relatively unimportant, with low functional load.
Thanks, I'll take t hat as a compliment since Khulls has a lot of marginal consonants that arose primariy from clusters .
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is it possible that hte ejectives appear more often in areas where the Russian stops are deaspirated? i.e. theyre picking up on allophones that would be unimportant in Russian but are important to Ossetian?
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