Chapter 4 The Aorist/Perfect Distinction in Nizh Udi Timur Maisak 1 Introduction Udi occupies a special position among the East Caucasian (Nakh- Daghestanian) languages. As far as the traditional genetic classification is con- cerned, it is a peripheral member of the Lezgic branch of the family, and is considered to be the first language that separated from the Proto-Lezgic (see Kassian 2015 for a recent phylogenetic overview). Geographically, Udi is the southernmost outlier of East Caucasian languages. It is one of the four lan- guages of the family only spoken in Azerbaijan (along with Kryz, Budugh and Khinalug), though unlike the three other languages, the Udis live at the foot- hills of the Caucasus, not in small mountain villages. Due to this geographical position, the contacts of Udi with such (non-East Caucasian) languages of the area as Persian, Armenian and Azerbaijani have been intense, which affected its linguistic structure on various levels. Udi is thus quite different from the “Daghestanian standard”: for example, it does not have ejective consonants (which rather shifted to non-aspirated), it has lost gender agreement, it has developed the Differential Object Marking strategy (absolutive vs. dative), the use of finite subordination became more common, etc. Udi is also known to be the descendant of the Caucasian Albanian (or Aghwan) language, the only East Caucasian language with an ancient writ- ten tradition and an alphabet created in the 5th century AD (see especially Schulze 2015). Although this tradition was abandoned centuries ago, and even the Caucasian Albanian alphabet as such was rediscovered only in the 1930s, the recent decipherment of the palimpsets found in St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai (and published in Gippert et al. 2008) enables us to get an insight into the distant history of the language. The present paper focuses on one fragment of the Udi tense and aspect sys- tem, namely the two most frequent forms expressing past time reference. As I will argue, the first of these forms, the one with the suffix -i, can be prop- erly characterized as the aorist (perfective past), while the second one, with the suffix -e, corresponds to the cross-linguistic category of the perfect (past tense with present relevance). There has not been much research on the Udi © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004361805_006 The Aorist/Perfect Distinction in Nizh Udi 121 verb system, especially as regards the semantics of verb forms, and the present study is intended to partly fill this gap. There are two dialects of the Udi language, and my data come from the modern Nizh dialect, centered in the big village of Nizh (Nic) in the Qabala district of Azerbaijan. The second dialect is that of the town formerly known as Vartashen (now Oğuz, center of the Oğuz district of Azerbaijan), with a Zinobiani, or Oktomberi subdialect in a small Udi village in the Kvareli dis- trict of Georgia. The last decades have witnessed gradual outflow of the Udi population from Azerbaijan, especially from Vartashen which has been almost totally abandoned by the Udis. It seems that about a half of Udi speakers, or even more, now lives in Russia, mainly in the southern regions like Krasnodar Krai, Stavropol Krai or Rostov Oblast. Thus, according to the official census, the number of Udis living in Russia was 4,267 in 2010, while there were about 3,800 of Udis living in Azerbaijan in 2009. In Georgia, the number of the Udis is estimated at about 300. The data for the present paper come from my own fieldwork, primarily in Nizh (Azerbaijan) and Shakhty (Russia), as well as from the available texts. The latter include both the texts in various versions of the Udi script published since mid-1990s (folklore, local anecdotes and portions of the Bible transla- tion), and also oral narratives recorded by the Moscow-based “Udilang” proj- ect (Dmitry Ganenkov, Yuri Lander and myself).1 Some comparative data from other Lezgic languages, including Agul and Tsakhur, mainly come from my ear- lier publications, in particular Maisak 2011, Maisak 2012, etc. I will start with an overview of the Nizh Udi tense and aspect (TAM) system, describing the inventory of forms and paying attention to the idiosyncratic be- havior of person agreement markers with different groups of forms (section 2). I will then proceed to a more detailed analysis of the semantics and the range of uses of the Aorist (section 3), the Perfect (section 4) and the Pluperfect, which is morphologically a “perfect in the past” (section 5). In section 6, I will look at the negation strategies used by the Aorist and the Perfect, and in par- ticular at the postpositional negation which is available only for the latter, and which may at least partly disclose the origin of the Perfect form. In section 7, I summarize the morphological and semantic characteristics of the Aorist and the Perfect, and suggest the diachronic scenarios of their origin and evolution. The paper closes with a short сonclusion section. 1 The sources are indicated in examples; see also the full list of sources in the references. The lack of source indication means that the example is elicited..