Affinal Kinship Terms in North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic Dialects Eleanor Coghill (University of Uppsala, [email protected]) SLE 2020
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Affinal kinship terms in North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects Eleanor Coghill (University of Uppsala, [email protected]) SLE 2020 1 Introduction Affinal kinship covers relationships which involve marriage (English ‘in-laws’). As with other kinship, its typology can be complex. Categories can involve the same factors as consanguineal kinship (as presented in Kroeber 1909, Greenberg 1990), e.g. o difference between generations o difference between lineal and collateral relationships o difference of age and difference of sex of the relative, ego or person through whom the relationship exists. Languages can vary widely in what distinctions they make among affinal relations, what categories they merge and what kinds of forms they use for given concepts. I would be very interested to hear of parallels in other languages, especially with regard to colexification. ∆ Jewish dialects ○ Christian dialects Map of the NENA dialects 1 The North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA) dialects are diverse language varieties native to Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran and spoken by Christian and Jewish communities. We now have a large dataset from dozens of varieties (from grammars and fieldwork, much of it in the Cambridge North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic database), as well as from earlier Aramaic varieties. Thus, one can see variation and change in affinal terminology within a language family over thousands of years. The etymology of now monolexic terms gives insights into earlier kinship categorization. Basic kinship terms for consanguineal relations (‘mother’, ‘brother’...) are well- documented for NENA dialects and vary little (except as the result of phonetic shifts). Regarding relations a degree or two more distant, there is a little more variation, due to the introduction of loanwords in some dialects (e.g. for grandchildren and aunts and uncles). Regarding affinal relations, some terms are common across dialects and/or remarkably time-stable in form and meaning, while others have shifted in meaning or are loanwords. 2 Sources and methodology The terms and their meanings have been gleaned from published grammars and the Cambridge NENA database, as well as my own fieldwork, and collected in an excel file. I have collected at least some data from 43 Christian and Jewish dialects (Appendix B). Methodological problems: o incomplete information in the sources: . few affinal terms given . lack of negative information: if only one meaning is given for a form, we don’t know whether this is the only meaning available or the researcher didn’t enquire further. Likewise if only one form is given for a given meaning. o errors in the sources. Transcription of NENA varies: to aid comparison, I have converted examples to my own transcription where possible (see Appendix A). Terms are presented first in bold in *reconstructed form (e.g. *gawra ‘man’, ‘husband’) representing an ancestral NENA form or forms. The actual dialectal forms reflect variation in phonetic shifts across the dialects, i.e. gawra, jawra, gawṛa, gora, goṛa, gūra, gǖra, jɔra,⁺ɟora, which is not relevant here. Earlier stages (reconstructed on the basis of other Aramaic varieties) may also be given, e.g. *gawra (< [Late Aramaic]*gaḇrā). 2 3 Cross-linguistic typology of kinship terminology Research on this topic is extensive: below are some of the concepts that are most useful for research on NENA affinal terminology. 3.1 Typology of relationship categorization Kroeber (1909: 78–79) identified 8 variables involved in cross-linguistic kinship categorization (only some are involved in any given language). Greenberg (1990: 87) considered (1), (4) and (7) to be universal: (1) Difference between generations (2) Difference between lineal and collateral relationships (3) Difference of age within a generation (e.g. older/younger brother) (4) Sex of the relative (5) Sex of the Ego [the speaker] (6) Sex of the person through whom the relationship exists (e.g. father’s or mother’s brother) (7) Difference between consanguineal or affinal relatives (8) The condition of life of the person through whom the relationship exists. It is common to merge some categories, e.g. across generations (Heath 2006: 214–215). Where different family members share the same term, they are said to be colexified.1 o For instance, ‘father’s sister’ and ‘mother’s sister’ are colexified in English (as aunt), but not in Arabic or Neo-Aramaic. A kinship term may denote a unique relationship (e.g. biological mother) or a finite set of relationships (e.g. English grandparent) or an open set of relationships (e.g. English relative).2 A kinship term is reciprocal when the person whom I refer to with a given term also refers to me with the same term (Kroeber 1909: 80–81). A term is self-reciprocal when two persons have exactly the same relationship to each other, e.g. two sisters (Greenberg 1990: 77–78). 4 Typology of expressions Terms may be classified as monolexic, dilexic or trilexic etc., depending on how many distinct lexemes they contain (Yassin 1977). Words may also be classified as being monomorphemic or multimorphemic. 1 There is a very useful new online database of colexifications in the world’s languages (https://clics.clld.org/). Unfortunately it does not have much useful data for this investigation. The database is described here: https://rdcu.be/b19GL. 2 Kinship terms have also been distinguished as ‘descriptive’ or ‘classificatory’, with the first denoting one relationship and the second more than one. There has, however, been confusion in the use of ‘descriptive’, as to whether it refers to a single kind of relationship, which may cover several individuals (e.g. son) or a single person (e.g. first-born son, biological father). See Davis and Warner (1937) for an early discussion of this problem. I will therefore avoid it. 3 Multilexic terms may become monolexic over time. o Thus C. Alqosh barəxmāya ‘spouse’s brother’ (pl. barəxmāyə) is synchronically monolexic but is a reflex of a dilexic term: *bar ḥmā [son.CSTR father_in_law] ‘son of father-in-law’ (see §9). Multilexic terms are not necessarily precisely descriptive of the relationship. o For instance, English (my) sister-in-law could mean ‘my brother’s wife’ or ‘my husband’s sister’ or ‘my husband’s brother’s wife’. One has the option of specifying with the dilexic description, my brother’s wife, if one wants to be precise. Terms may also be distinguished according to their use in discourse. Many languages make distinctions between referential terms (used when referring to the person) and terms of address (used when addressing the person). o Terms may change from one category to the other, however. In my English idiolect, mother is referential and Mum a term of address, but informally I may use Mum referentially, as in I’m calling my mum tonight. Kinship terms are by their nature prone to be expressed as possessed and in some languages they never occur in an unpossessed state (Bickel and Nichols 2013).In NENA they are usually possessed, but not obligatorily. They will be cited in their unpossessed forms. 5 Abbreviations for relationships Anthropologists for convenience use some standard abbreviations for relationships: F=father, M=mother, S=son, D=daughter, B=brother, Z=sister, H=husband, W=wife, Sp=spouse (H or W), Ego=person to whom the relation pertains. WZH is ‘wife’s sister’s husband’ (not ‘wife of the sister of one’s husband’). The categories this notation is based on have their limitations, as they are not universal elements in kinship systems. o They do not include factors such as age (important in some systems) and make distinctions that in some languages complicate quite simple relations. o This is neatly demonstrated in Haspelmath’s (2020) discussion,3 based on Evans (2011: 509–510). Indonesian kakak means simply ‘older sibling’ (age being significant but not sex), but the standard notation requires ‘B/Z’ and lacks a designation for relative age. Kayardild kularrind refers to a sibling of the opposite sex (so Z if you are male and B if you are female) and also cannot be simply notated in this system. Nevertheless, the notation works reasonably well for NENA, if not perfectly, so will be used here as a complement to the sometimes neater definitions given in English. 3 https://dlc.hypotheses.org/2040 4 6 NENA affinal kinship classification For convenience, affinal kinship terms in NENA can be divided conceptually into five types: (1) spouses of ego (2) spouses of ego’s consanguineal relations (e.g. ‘my brother’s wife’) (3) consanguineal relations of ego’s spouse (e.g. ‘my husband’s sister’) (4) self-reciprocal relations of the third degree (e.g. ‘my husband’s brother’s wife’) (5) other spouse of ego’s spouse (e.g. ‘my rival wife’) Selected terms or issues of particular interest will be discussed for each category. 7 Category (1): Spouses of ego Most commonly, spouses of ego are colexified with ‘man’ and ‘woman’, although some dialects have introduced new, competing, (loan-)words for ‘wife’ and ‘man’, respectively. *baxta ‘(married) woman’, ‘wife’ W is something of a mystery. Of all Aramaic varieties, past and present, it is only attested in NENA, where it is universal. It is first attested in a medicinal manuscript written in 1130 (Khan 2008: 98). There are two possible etymologies: a borrowing from Kurdish bext/Persian baxt ‘luck, fortune’ and an rare Aramaic word meaning ‘(female) spinner’ or ‘weaveress’. ‘Wife’, or more generally ‘woman’, is often expressed in languages in the Middle East by a euphemism, e.g. Moroccan Arabic ḍāṛ ‘house, wife’ (Harrell and Sobleman 1985), Najd Arabic mʕazziba ‘hostess, wife’ (Ingham 1982: 108), and Gulf Arabic ḥurma ‘wife’ < ‘honour’ (Holes 1990: 284). ‘Honour’ is also a meaning attributed to Kurdish bext, though rarer, and would fit better perhaps as a euphemism.