Current Issues in Kurdish Linguistics Current Issues in Kurdish Linguistics 1 Bamberg Studies in Kurdish Linguistics Bamberg Studies in Kurdish Linguistics
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Bamberg Studies in Kurdish Linguistics 1 Songül Gündoğdu, Ergin Öpengin, Geofrey Haig, Erik Anonby (eds.) Current issues in Kurdish linguistics Current issues in Kurdish linguistics 1 Bamberg Studies in Kurdish Linguistics Bamberg Studies in Kurdish Linguistics Series Editor: Geofrey Haig Editorial board: Erik Anonby, Ergin Öpengin, Ludwig Paul Volume 1 2019 Current issues in Kurdish linguistics Songül Gündoğdu, Ergin Öpengin, Geofrey Haig, Erik Anonby (eds.) 2019 Bibliographische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deut schen Nationalbibliographie; detaillierte bibliographische Informationen sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de/ abrufbar. Diese Veröff entlichung wurde im Rahmen des Elite-Maststudiengangs „Kul- turwissenschaften des Vorderen Orients“ durch das Elitenetzwerk Bayern ge- fördert, einer Initiative des Bayerischen Staatsministeriums für Wissenschaft und Kunst. Die Verantwortung für den Inhalt dieser Veröff entlichung liegt bei den Auto- rinnen und Autoren. Dieses Werk ist als freie Onlineversion über das Forschungsinformations- system (FIS; https://fi s.uni-bamberg.de) der Universität Bamberg erreichbar. Das Werk – ausgenommen Cover, Zitate und Abbildungen – steht unter der CC-Lizenz CC-BY. Lizenzvertrag: Creative Commons Namensnennung 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0. Herstellung und Druck: Digital Print Group, Nürnberg Umschlaggestaltung: University of Bamberg Press © University of Bamberg Press, Bamberg 2019 http://www.uni-bamberg.de/ubp/ ISSN: 2698-6612 ISBN: 978-3-86309-686-1 (Druckausgabe) eISBN: 978-3-86309-687-8 (Online-Ausgabe) URN: urn:nbn:de:bvb:473-opus4-558751 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.20378/irbo-55875 Acknowledgements This volume contains a selection of contributions originally presented at the Third International Conference on Kurdish Linguistics (ICKL3), University of Ams- terdam, in August 2016. We are very grateful to the organizers of the confer- ence for providing the impetus for this volume, to a number of anonymous referees for their expert input in the reviewing procedure, and of course to all our authors who have patiently cooperated throughout the lengthy editorial process. In particular, we would like to thank Jenny Herzky for supervising the technical issues involved in formatting a complex manuscript, and Han- nah Sarrazin and Maria Vollmer for assistance in layout and proof-reading. We would also like to express our gratitude to the Department of General Lin- guistics in Bamberg for fnancial support, and to the Elitenetzwerk Bayern, who fnance the Bamberg MA-programme “Cultural Studies of the Middle East” and who made a generous contribution to the production costs of this volume. The Editors Contents Acknowledgements . ....................... i Foreword to the new series . v Introduction . 1 Songül Gündoğdu, Ergin Öpengin, Geofrey Haig & Erik Anonby Kordestan Province in the Atlas of the Languages of Iran: Research process, language distribution, and language classification . 9 Erik Anonby, Masoud Mohammadirad & Jafer Sheyholislami Pharyngeals in Kurmanji Kurdish: A reanalysis of their source and status . 39 Daniel Barry Towards a dialectology of Southern Kurdish: Where to begin? . 73 Sara Belelli Asymmetries in Kurmanji morphosyntax . 93 Songül Gündoğdu Debonding of inflectional morphology in Kurdish and beyond . 117 Geofrey Haig Language choice and patterns of usage among Kurdish speakers of Duhok: An empirical intergenerational study . 145 Geofrey Haig & Baydaa Mustafa Temporal noun squishes in Kurmanji academic writing: From lex- icality via NP-level junction to clausal subordination . 169 Annette Herkenrath Kurdish -râ as an Anti-Actor marker . 205 Gholamhossein Karimi Doostan & Fatemeh Daneshpazhouh iv Revisiting Kurdish dialect geography: Findings from the Manch- ester Database . 225 Yaron Matras Accounting for the combinations of clitic and affix person mark- ers in Central Kurdish . 243 Ergin Öpengin Foreword to the new series Bamberg Studies in Kurdish Linguistics (BSKL) Despite the chronic shortage of institutional support, research in Kurdish lin- guistics continues to thrive. Among recent developments, one can mention the International Conference on Kurdish Linguistics, which began as an informal workshop in Bamberg in 2013 and has since grown into a regular interna- tional conference series, or the Database of Kurdish Dialects, the frst large- scale web-accessible dialect survey of Kurdish, hosted at the University of Manchester. What remains a desideratum, however, is a platform for dis- seminating quality research in a readily accessible format. The new series Bamberg Studies in Kurdish Linguistics (BSKL) aims at flling this gap by providing a publication forum for high-quality research on Kur- dish linguistics that is open access, hosted at an established research institu- tion, and committed to high standards of scientifc excellence. BSKL adopts a broad stance on what can be considered “Kurdish linguistics”, in terms of the languages in focus, the range of topics, and the format of the volumes. The primary criterion is scientifc excellence, and the editors are committed to ensuring high standards. It seems very appropriate that the frst volume in the series is a selection of contributions to the International Conference on Kurdish Linguistics, held in Amsterdam in 2016, which provides a vivid cross- section of contemporary research in Kurdish linguistics. It has taken several years of planning before we could fnally inaugurate the series, and we are extremely grateful to a number of people for their patience and support during that time, in particular the staf at Bamberg University Press, who agreed to the volume conception several years ago and have continued to support it since. Finally, I would like to thank the co-editors of the series, Erik Anonby, Ergin Öpengin and Ludwig Paul, for collaborating with me on the new series. Bamberg, 5th July 2019 Geofrey Haig, editor-in-chief of BSKL 1 Introduction Songül Gündoğdu, Ergin Öpengin, Geofrey Haig & Erik Anonby The history of Kurdish linguistics can be traced back to the 17th and 18th centuries with the works of Kurdish authors, who worked within the wide- spread Arabic-centred tradition of grammar writing (cf. Leezenberg 2014). This was followed by works in the Orientalist tradition, the frst one being Maurizio Garzoni’s notable grammar and vocabulary of Kurmanji Kurdish published in 1787. In the subsequent two centuries, up until the mid-20th century, a large number of works describing the grammar of particular dialects appeared, and often vocabulary samples and construction types from Kurdish were also incorporated into comparative studies by scholars of Indo-European grammar. Most of those grammars are modeled after the categories distinguished in Latin or those of the working language of the orientalist author. Noteworthy are also the two “sensibly prescriptive” grammars of Sorani and Kurmanji Kurdish in the second quarter of 20th century, the frst one by Tawfq Wahbi (1929) and the second one by Djeladet Ali Bedir-Khan (Celadet Alî Bedirxan) with Roger Lescot (1970), itself based on a series of articles in the journal Hawar that were published between 1932 and 1943. Work in Kurdish linguistics – in its modern sense – began only in the 1950s, with the studies of such authors as C. J. Edmonds (e.g. 1955), David N. MacKenzie (e.g. 1961), and Ernest McCarus (e.g. 1958) providing principled descriptions of Kurdish grammar as well as accounts of particular phenomena in Kurdish morphology and syntax. However, with extremely limited institutional support the research on Kurdish remained sporadic and constrained. It was only with the new millennium, when the visibility of the Kurds on the international scene increased and sovereign states governing Kurdish societies eased restrictions on the use of and work on Kurdish, that there has been increased interest in Kurdish linguistics in international academia. Over the last two decades, many young scholars, including those 2 Songül Gündoğdu, Ergin Öpengin, Geofrey Haig & Erik Anonby at universities in Kurdish-speaking regions of Iraq, Turkey and Iran, have had the chance to pursue research projects for their post-graduate studies on Kurdish. However, collective venues such as conferences and edited volumes or journals dedicated to Kurdish linguistics have been scarce. The most im- portant event along these lines was the First Kurdish Linguistics Conference organized at the University of Kiel, Germany, in 2000, the contributions of which were collected in a special issue of the journal Language Typology and Universals (2002). The conference was not continued as a recurrent event, but research in Kurdish linguistics began to fgure more frequently in other topically broader conferences, particularly at the biennial International Conference on Iranian Linguistics. However, a workshop focusing specifcally on “Variation and Change in Kurdish” was held in 2013 at the University of Bamberg and a selection of its contributions were edited in a special issue of the journal Kurdish Studies (2014). The introductory article there (Haig & Öpengin 2014) summarizes the current topics, trends, and desiderata in the feld. The workshop was continued in the form of the International Conference on Kurdish Linguistics (ICKL), which gathered frst at Mardin Artuklu University (2014) and subsequently at the University of Amsterdam (2016) and the University of Rouen (2019). In a short span of time this