From the Editorial Board
Mikhail Egorovich Alekseev
On May 23rd, 2014, at the age of 65 has passed away Mikhail Yegorovich Alekseyev, the founder of the journal "Rodnoy yazyk", extraordinary Russian linguist, specialist on Caucasus, on typology and historical-comparativistic grammar of East Caucasian languages.
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Mikhail Egorovich Alekseev
Memories of the Rodnoy Yazyk journal in 1994
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Legacy papers
M. E. Alekseyev
Noun phrases in Shugni
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The main material for the work was the notes made during the expedition of the Department of Structural and Applied Linguistics of the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University to the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region in the summer of 1969. The transcription of I. I. Zarubin was adopted in the article (see I. I. Zarubin, Shugnan texts and dictionary, M.-L., 1960). The article was published in the journal “Peoples of Asia and Africa” (1973, No. 6, pp. 131–136) and is reproduced with the format preserved.
Keywords: Shughni language, Pamir languages, Iranian languages, collocation, syntax
D. I. Edelman
A glimpse into the history of Shugni syntax (comments to M.E. Alekseyev’s article on “Noun phrases in Shugni”)
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This article focuses on certain types of noun phrases (syntagms) in the Shughni language that provide information on the history of syntax in the Iranian languages.
Keywords: noun phrase structure, language history, syntax, Shughni language, Burushaski language, Iranian languages
L. R. Dodykhudoyeva
The Shugni term for playing on a tambourine
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The present article is devoted to a particular type of Shughni noun phrase in which syntactic relations are expressed by means of positional contiguity. Shughni likewise exhibits syntactic relations marked by the izafat construction, which was borrowed from the Tajik language. The article also gives an overview of the particular features of local varieties of the frame drum (daf) in the Western Pamir Mts., and this drum's role in indigenous culture. Melodic patterns of performance in Badakhshan (Tajikistan and Afghanistan) are likewise discussed. The article includes a glossed Shughni text with a Russian translation, recorded in an interview with Professor Shodikhon P. Yusufbekov, an expert on Pamiri Studies.
Keywords: noun phrases, compound words, Shughni, Tajik, percussive musical instruments, daf frame drum
Language contact
O. A. Mudrak
Phonetic and semantic Caucasian language influence on Ossetic
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The present article provides a first look at the regular phonetic correspondences found in the Ossetic adaptations of numerous Caucasian loanwords. These correspondences hold true over a large corpus of borrowings, first and foremost from the proto‐Dargi language. Analyzing these borrowings in Ossetic (both the Iron and Digor data) allows us to map the historical migration patterns of the ancestors of the Ossetic people through the Caucasus area. The article also examines in detail borrowings found in the semantic domain of words having to do with plants.
Keywords: historical linguistics, etymology, Caucasian languages, borrowing, phonetic correspondence, semantic domains, Ossetic language, Dargi language, Nakh languages, North Caucasian languages
Linguistic aspects of Bible translation
A. S. Desnitsky
Syntactic restructuring in Bible translation
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This article offers several examples of syntactic transformations that occur in Bible translations into Russian and several Turkic languages. Such transformations are necessary due to the differences between syntactic structures in different languages, and also due to the existence of multiple possible meanings for a single construction. The examples presented in the article are taken from translation projects of the Institute for Bible Translation and deal primarily with the choice of grammatical forms, participant reference, and negation.
Key words: Bible translation, syntax, restructuring, participant reference, negation
Language sketches
A. I. Kuznetsova
The dialects of the Komi language
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This article reviews the subdialects of the three Komi dialects. The discussion includes dialect studies, where speakers live, the literary language, language contacts.
Key words: Komi dialects, sociolinguistics, language contact
Reviews
A. A. Rostovtsev-Popiel
[Review of:] A Mingrelian-Russian Dictionary by G.A. Klimov, O.M. Kadzhina, K.T. Gadilia, 2013
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Recent events
I. V. Andreyeva, T. B. Agranat
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International conference on “Language ecology: Issues in the historical and contemporary endangerment of languages and cultures”
A. Salamanova, E. Seminogina, D. Sheyko
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International conference on “Linguistic ecology: The problem of vanishing languages and cultures in history and the present day”
T. A. Maysak
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Open session of the Department of Caucasian languages (Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences) on “M.E. Alekseev and the perspectives of Dagestanian linguistics”
Rodnoy Yazyk 2014, 1