Endangered Iranian Languages edited by Saloumeh Gholami constitutes the proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Endangered Iranian Languages, held in Paris on 8–9 July 2016. It was published in 2018, just two years after the conference, but offers only five of the 16 contributions presented at the conference. The book begins with a summary (p. 5), followed by the editor's preface (p. 7–8), and then the articles, which are classified by their (decreasing) number of pages.
The first article, by Mohammad Dabir-Moqaddam (pp. 9–40), is both an impressive, detailed synthesis of previous debates on the origin of the Middle Iranian ergative construction (pp. 12–20), and a discussion using modern data from many endangered Iranian languages (pp. 20–32). The author then uses the standard Old Iranian examples to support his argument (pp. 32–5). The paper focuses principally on the representation of the notion of “being” and of the verb “to be” in Old, Middle and New Iranian. After reading the original and new modern Iranian data the reader is able to view the old examples with a fresh perspective. The author concludes (pp. 35–7) that a non-canonical subject construction “with the core meaning ‘exist’ is attested in the syntax of Old Persian”. Through analogy, this construction was extended to phrases containing a past participle of transitive verbs. Later, it extended to the syntax of all transitive pasts. It is useful to focus on those endangered and lesser studied languages that inform the linguist in so many ways and are often overlooked. Agnes Korn's two articles on Balochi ergativity (“Marking of arguments in Balochi ergative and mixed constructions” in Simin Karimi et al., Aspects of Iranian Linguistics, 2008, and “The ergative system in Balochi from a typological perspective”, Iranian Journal of Applied Language Studies 1, 2009) could be added to the bibliography for completeness.
Donald Stilo sketches, for the first time, the grammar of an otherwise unstudied Iranian language (pp. 41–69): the Marāqei of Dikin, based on recordings he made on a single day (p. 42). He presents the phonology (p. 42), nominal morphology (pp. 43–5), parts of the syntax (pp. 46–8), the verbal system (pp. 49–61), the alignment system (pp. 61–6), and a few words on the historical phonology of the language (p. 67). Since this entire description is based on a single day of fieldwork, it is very impressive. It brings to light yet another Iranian language of which nothing was known before, and one may only hope that more research will be conducted before its possible extinction. Marāqei is spoken exclusively by a secret religious community that also call themselves kalle-bozi “goat-head” in Persian (p. 42) (“goat” is bez in Marāqei, see p. 43).
Brigitte Werner describes the use of the ezafe in Zazaki (pp. 71–91). I found this article excellent, both clear and easy to read. It is a very good departure point for learning more about the subject, and it also brings to light new insights, including uses and functions of the ezafe that have not been described before. The ezafe is so complex in Zazaki that one may wonder whether another name would not be more suitable. It is clear that the author has checked her data carefully with informants.
Jaroslava Obrtelová and Raihon Sahibnazarbekova present the Wakhi language, and discuss the historical attempts at reviving it (pp. 93–109). They discuss the history of the transcription of Wakhi, the various attempts at creating an alphabet, and the political history surrounding these efforts. It should be noted that the authors themselves played a major role in the introduction of the alphabet. They provide interesting tables and a text in the appendix (pp. 103–8).
Saloumeh Gholami examines the pronominal clitics of the “Zoroastrian Dari” dialect of Kerman (pp. 111–22), more generally called Gavruni by its speakers. After a short introduction (p. 111), the author presents the forms and discusses their origin, comparing them with a number of other Iranian languages (pp. 112–4), and their function (pp. 114–8). She then discusses their implications on the synchronic and diachronic syntax of the language (pp. 117–9) before concluding (p. 120). Regarding the contents, a few critical remarks should be made. The notions of Northwestern and Southwestern Iranian (p. 111) on the one hand, and that of Central Iranian (p. 112) on the other correspond to two contradictory conceptions of the Iranian phylogenetic tree and should not be used together, at least not without explanation. Gholami does not differentiate between inherited and borrowed pronouns: to in Kermani is a loan from Persian, as are -mun, -tun and -šun (p. 113). They were not used in Lorimer's time, cf. “Notes on the Gabri dialect of Modern Persian”, JRAS, 1916, which is absent from the bibliography: I find it regrettable that Lorimer's paper, which describes most of the functions and forms of the discussed clitics (pp. 448–50), has not been taken into account. The whole study is biased by the fact that the author does not consider Yazdi Gavruni, which is often more conservative. Kerm. wo, Yazd. wu, vů “to want” cannot derive from xwāh (p. 116), cf. *xwāh “sister” > xoy. It can be proved that ta 2sg cannot derive from *ta wa, and that the vowel of the singular clitics does not change according to context (p. 113). The transcription is in fact a transliteration of the Perso-Arabic alphabet. It maintains irrelevant distinctions, such as vocalic length, and is thus inadequate to represent the phonology of the language.
This book gathers together a number of valuable contributions, including the first ever description of Marāqei of Dikin, as well as discussions of lesser-known Iranian languages. It is nevertheless rather short, and addresses only indirectly the problems of endangered Iranian languages. One can regret that the picture on the cover (Wikicommons), shows an outdated tree of Iranian languages, from which most of the languages discussed in this book are missing.
