Ossetian language


Ossetian, more commonly called Ossetic and rarely Ossete, is an Eastern Iranian language spoken in Ossetia, a region on the northern slopes of the Caucasus Mountains. It is a relative and possibly a descendant of the extinct Scythian, Sarmatian, and Alanic languages.
The Ossete area in Russia is known as North Ossetia–Alania, while the area south of the border is referred to as South Ossetia, recognised by Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Nauru as an independent state but by most of the rest of the international community as part of Georgia. Ossetian speakers number about 614,350, with 451,000 speakers in the Russian Federation recorded in the 2010 census.

History and classification

Ossetian is the spoken and literary language of the Ossetes, a people living in the central part of the Caucasus and constituting the basic population of the republic of North Ossetia–Alania, which belongs to the Russian Federation, and of South Ossetia, which is de facto independent. Ossetian belongs to the Iranian group of the Indo-European family of languages. Within Iranian it is placed in an Eastern subgroup and further to a Northeastern sub-subgroup, but these are areal rather than genetic groups. The other Eastern Iranian languages such as Pashto and Yaghnobi show certain commonalities but also deep-reaching divergences from Ossetic.
From deep Antiquity, the languages of the Iranian group were distributed in a vast territory including present-day Iran, Central Asia, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. Ossetian is the sole survivor of the branch of Iranian languages known as Scythian. The Scythian group included numerous tribes, known in ancient sources as the Scythians, Massagetae, Saka, Sarmatians, Alans and Roxolans. The more easterly Khorezmians and the Sogdians were also closely affiliated, in linguistic terms.
Ossetian, together with Kurdish, Tati and Talyshi, is one of the main Iranian languages with a sizable community of speakers in the Caucasus. It is descended from Alanic, the language of the Alans, medieval tribes emerging from the earlier Sarmatians. It is believed to be the only surviving descendant of a Sarmatian language. The closest genetically related language may be the Yaghnobi language of Tajikistan, the only other living Northeastern Iranian language. Ossetian has a plural formed by the suffix -ta, a feature it shares with Yaghnobi, Sarmatian and the now-extinct Sogdian; this is taken as evidence of a formerly wide-ranging Iranian-language dialect continuum on the Central Asian steppe. The names of ancient Iranian tribes in fact reflect this pluralization, e.g. Saromatae and Masagetae.

Evidence for Medieval Ossetian

The earliest known written sample of Ossetian is an inscription which dates from the 10th to 12th centuries and was found near the River Bolshoi Zelenchuk at Arkhyz. The text is written in the Greek alphabet, with special digraphs.
InscriptionTransliterationTranslation
—ΣΑΧΗΡΗ ΦΟΥΡΤ ΧΟΒΣ
ΗΣΤΟΡΗ ΦΟΥΡΤ ΠΑΚΑΘΑΡ
ΠΑΚΑΘΑΡΗ ΦΟΥΡΤ ΑΝΠΑΛΑΝ
ΑΝΠΑΛΑΝΗ ΦΟΥΡΤ ΛΑΚ
ΑΝΗ ΤΖΗΡΘΕ		—Saxiri Furt Xovs
Istori Furt Bӕqӕtar
Bӕqӕtari Furt Æmbalan
Æmbalani Furt Lak
Ani čirtī		"K., son of S., son of I., son of B., son of A.; their monument." The original, following Zgusta, translates only initials; presumably this is because although the uninflected forms may be inferred, no written records of them have been found to date.

The only other extant record of Proto-Ossetic are the two lines of "Alanic" phrases appearing in the Theogony of John Tzetzes, a 12th century Byzantine poet and grammarian:
The portions in bold face above are Ossetian. Going beyond a direct transliteration of the Greek text, scholars have attempted a phonological reconstruction using the Greek as clues, thus, while τ would usually be given the value "t", it instead is "d", which is thought to be the way the early Ossetes would have pronounced it. The scholarly transliteration of the Alanic phrases is: "dӕ ban xʷӕrz, mӕ sfili, xsinjӕ kurθi kӕndӕ" and "du farnitz, kintzӕ mӕ sfili, kajci fӕ wa sawgin?"; equivalents in modern Ossetian would be "Dӕ bon xwarz, me’fšini ‘xšinӕ, kurdigӕj dӕ?" and " farm neč, kinźi ӕfšini xӕcc fӕwwa sawgin". The passage translates as:
Marginalia of Greek religious books, with some parts of the book translated into Old Ossetic, have been recently found.
It is theorized that during the Proto-Ossetic phase, Ossetian underwent a process of phonological change conditioned by a Rhythmusgesetz or "Rhythm-law" whereby nouns were divided into two classes, those heavily or lightly stressed. "Heavy-stem" nouns possessed a "heavy" long vowel or diphthong, and were stressed on the first-occurring syllable of this type; "light-stem" nouns were stressed on their final syllable. This is precisely the situation observed in the earliest records of Ossetian presented above. This situation also obtains in Modern Ossetian, although the emphasis in Digor is also affected by the "openness" of the vowel. The trend is also found in a glossary of the Jassic dialect dating from 1422.

Dialects

There are two important dialects: Digor and Iron, spoken by one-sixth and five-sixths of the population, respectively. A third dialect of Ossetian, Jassic, was formerly spoken in Hungary.

Phonology

The Iron dialect of Ossetic has 7 vowels:
FrontCentralBack
Closeи у
Close-midы
Midе о
Near-openӕ
Openа

The Ossetian researcher V. I. Abayev distinguishes 26 consonants, to which five labialized consonants and two semivowels may be added. Unusually for an Indo-European language, there is a series of glottalized stops and affricates. This can be considered an areal feature of languages of the Caucasus.
Voiceless consonants become voiced word-medially.,, and were originally allophones of,, and when followed by, and ; this alternation is still retained to a large extent.
Stress normally falls on the first syllable, unless it has a "weak" vowel, in which case it falls on the second syllable. In the Iron dialect, definiteness is expressed in post-initially stressed words by shifting the stress to the initial syllable. This reflects the fact that historically they received a syllabic definite article, and the addition of the syllable caused the stress to shift.

Grammar

According to V.I. Abaev,

Nouns

Ossetic has lost the grammatical category of gender which many Indo-European languages have preserved until today.
According to the Encyclopӕdia Britannica 2006 Ossetian preserves many archaic features of Old Iranian, such as eight cases and verbal prefixes. It is debated how many of these cases are actually inherited from Indo-Iranian case morphemes and how many have re-developed, after the loss of the original case forms, through cliticization of adverbs or re-interpretations of derivational suffixes: the number of "inherited" cases according to different scholars ranges from as few as three to as many as six. Some are secondary beyond any doubt.

Definiteness

is, according to Abaev, only expressed by shift of word accent from the second to the first syllable :
Nouns and adjectives share the same morphology and distinguish two numbers and nine cases: nominative, genitive, dative, directive, ablative, inessive, adessive, equative, and comitative. The nominal morphology is agglutinative: the case suffixes and the number suffix are separate, the case suffixes are the same for both numbers and the number suffix is the same for all cases :
Singularsingular romanizationPluralplural romanization
Nominativeсӕрsӕrсӕртӕsӕrtӕ
Genitiveсӕрыsӕryсӕртыsӕrty
Dativeсӕрӕнsӕrӕnсӕртӕнsӕrtӕn
Allativeсӕрмӕsӕrmӕсӕртӕмsӕrtӕm
Ablativeсӕрӕйsӕrӕjсӕртӕйsӕrtӕj
Inessiveсӕрыsӕryсӕртыsӕrty
Adessiveсӕрылsӕrylсӕртылsӕrtyl
Equativeсӕрауsӕrauсӕртауsӕrtau
Comitativeсӕримӕsӕrimӕсӕртимӕsӕrtimӕ

Since inessive and genitive show the same forms in both numbers, it is sometimes debated whether Ossetian might possess eight case forms for each number instead of nine.

Verbs

Verbs distinguish six persons, three tenses, and three moods. The person, tense and mood morphemes are mostly fused. Passive voice is expressed periphrastically with the past passive participle and an auxiliary verb meaning "to go"; causative and reflexive meaning are also expressed by periphrastic constructions. Verbs may belong to one of two lexical aspects ; these are expressed by prefixes, which often have prepositional origin. There is an infinitive, four participles, and a gerund. Vowel and consonant alternations occur between the present and past stems of the verb and between intransitive and transitive forms. Intransitive and transitive verbs also differ in the endings they take in the past tense. There are also special verb forms, such as immediate future tense that is transmitted by adding -inag to the verb and the auxiliary verb meaning "to be". Future Imperative is another special form that is transmitted through usage of independent particle iu. Yet another special verbal form that is used to reflect either an interrupted process or a process that has nearly been completed. This form is made up through the use of a particle sӕi that is stuck between the prefix, usually fӕ- and the verb.
Ossetic uses mostly postpositions, although two prepositions exist in the language. Noun modifiers precede nouns. The word order is not rigid, but tends towards SOV. The morphosyntactic alignment is nominative–accusative, although there is no accusative case: rather, the direct object is in the nominative or in the genitive.
For numerals above 20, two systems are in use – a decimal one used officially, and a vigesimal one used colloquially.

Writing system

Written Ossetian may be immediately recognized by its use of the Cyrillic letter Ae, a letter to be found in no other language using Cyrillic script. The father of the modern Ossetian literary language is the national poet Kosta Khetagurov.
An Iron literary language was established in the 18th century, written using the Cyrillic script in Russia and the Georgian script in Georgia. The first Ossetian book was published in Cyrillic in 1798, and in 1844 the alphabet was revised by a Russian scientist of Finnish-Swedish origin, Andreas Sjögren. A new alphabet based on the Latin script was made official in the 1920s, but in 1937 a revised Cyrillic alphabet was introduced, with digraphs replacing most diacritics of the 1844 alphabet.
In 1820, I. Yalguzidze published a Georgian-script alphabetic primer, adding three letters to the Georgian alphabet. The Georgian orthography receded in the 19th century, but was made official with Georgian autonomy in 1937. The "one nation – two alphabets" issue caused discontent in South Ossetia in the year 1951 demanding reunification of the script, and in 1954 Georgian was replaced with the 1937 Cyrillic alphabet.
The table below shows the modern Cyrillic alphabet, used since 1937, with phonetic values for the Iron dialect in the IPA. Di- and tri-graphs in parentheses are not officially letters of the alphabet, but are listed here to represent phonemically distinctive sounds:
LetterАӔБВГГъДДжДзЕЗИЙККъЛ
Letterаӕбвггъддждзезийккъл
IPA
LetterМНОППъРСТТъУФХХъЦЦъЧЧъЫ
Letterмноппърсттъуфххъццъччъы
IPA,

In addition, the letters,,,,,,,, and are used to transcribe Russian loans.
LetterAÆBCChČČhDDzDžEFGGuHHuIJKKu
Letteraӕbcchččhddzdžefgguhhuijkku
IPA
LetterKhKhuLMNOPPhQQuRSTThUVXXuYZ
Letterkhkhulmnopphqqurstthuvxxuyz
IPA,

In addition, the letters and were used to transcribe Russian words. The "weak" vowels and are extremely common in the language.

Language usage

The first printed book in Ossetian appeared in 1798. The first newspaper, Iron Gazet, appeared on July 23, 1906 in Vladikavkaz.
While Ossetian is the official language in both South and North Ossetia, its official use is limited to publishing new laws in Ossetian newspapers. There are two daily newspapers in Ossetian: Rӕstdzinad in the North and Xurzӕrin in the South. Some smaller newspapers, such as district newspapers, use Ossetian for some articles. There is a monthly magazine Max dug, mostly devoted to contemporary Ossetian fiction and poetry.
Ossetian is taught in secondary schools for all pupils. Native Ossetian speakers also take courses in Ossetian literature.
The first Ossetian language Bible was published in 2010. It is currently the only full version of the Bible in the Ossetian language.

Vocabulary

The following table illustrates some common Ossetic words with cognates or translations in other Indo-Iranian and other Indo-European languages.
Englishfiremonthnewmothersisternightnosethreeredyellowgreenwolf
Ossetianарт
art		мӕй
mey		нӕуӕг
neweg		мад
mad		хо
xo		ӕхсӕв
exšev		фындз
fêndz		ӕртӕ
erte		сырх
šerx		бур
bur		цъӕх
tsex		бирӕгъ
bireğ
Pashtoاور
ōr		مياشت
myāšt		نوی
nəway		مور
mōr		خور
xōr		شپه
špa		پوزه
pōza		درې
drē		سور
sur		زيړ
zyaṛ		شين
šin		لېوه
lēwə
Kurdishagir / armeh/heyvnumak/dayikxwişkşevpozsêsorzerd/borkesk/şîngur / wir
Mazanderanitashmungnoumārkhakhershufeniseserkhzardsuzwerg
Persianآتش
ātaš		ماه
māh		نو
now		مادر
mādar		خواهر
xāhar		شب
šab		بینی / پوزه
poze / bini		سه
se		سرخ
sorx		بور/ زرد
zard / bur		سبز
sabz		گرگ
gorg
Sanskritagníḥmā́s/mā́saḥnávaḥ/návyaḥmā́tāsvásānák/náktiḥnás/nā́sātráyaḥrudhiráḥpítháriḥvṛ́kaḥ
Kamkata-variāŋomosnuĩnuasusřotrnāsuřtrepuṭādraādraṣiol
GermanFeuerMonatneuMutterSchwesterNachtNasedreirotgelbgrünWolf
Latinignismēnsisnovusmātersorornoxnasustrēsruberflāvus, gilvusviridislupus
Modern Greekφωτιά
fôtiá		μήνας
mếnas		νέος
néos		μητέρα
mêtéra		αδελφή
adelfế		νύχτα
nýhta		μύτη
mýtê		τρία
tría		κοκκινός
kokkinós		κίτρινος
kítrinos		πράσσινος
prássinos		λύκος
lýkos
Armenianհուր
hur		ամիս
amis		նոր
nor		մայր
mayr		քույր
k'uyr		գիշեր
gišer		քիթ
k'it'		երեք
yerek'		կարմիր
karmir		դեղին
değin		կանաչ
kanač		գայլ
gayl
Lithuanianugnismėnuonaujasmotinasesuonaktisnosistrysraudonasgeltonasžaliasvilkas
Russianогонь
ogon'		месяц
mesâc		новый
novıĭ		мать
mat'		сестра
sestra		ночь
noč'		нос
nos		три
tri		красный
krasnıĭ		жёлтый
žëltıĭ		зелёный
zelënıĭ		волк
volk
Irishtinemínuamáthairdeirfiúroíchesróntrídearg/ruabuíglasfaolchú