Books by Nikita Kuzin
The authors present the second volume of their work on documenting the Turoyo dialect of Midyat (... more The authors present the second volume of their work on documenting the Turoyo dialect of Midyat (Miḏyoyo) — the glossary. The glossary contains all lexemes occurring in the texts published in the first volume (Jastrow, Talay 2019). Verbal entries are organized according to the root, with the root being the lemma and the verbal stems following below. All non-verbal entries appear in the alphabetical order. The lexemes are provided with grammatical information and illustrated by examples. Additional forms and idiomatic expressions are placed in the sub-entries. Each entry is also supplied with brief etymological information. The appendix contains the verbs of the glossary in their inflected forms, to facilitate the lookup process. Another appendix has a German-Aramaic word list. Since the glossary is limited to the words occurring in the previously published volume of the Midyat texts, it only contains a part of the Turoyo lexicon. It is intended to serve as the foundation for a future comprehensive dictionary of Turoyo.
Papers by Nikita Kuzin
Current Research in Semitic Studies. Proceedings of the Semitic Studies Section at the 34th DOT at Freie Universität Berlin, 2024
The paper examines the phenomenon of labile verbs in Ṭuroyo. In simple terms, labile verbs are su... more The paper examines the phenomenon of labile verbs in Ṭuroyo. In simple terms, labile verbs are such verbs that can be used both transitively and intransitively without a formal change. The question that is in the background of this study is whether labile verbs in Ṭuroyo are a regular grammatical phenomenon, competing with verbal stems and other grammatical constructions, or they are merely isolated lexical items that have emerged spontaneously. To answer this question, we present synchronic corpus data on labile verbs.
Perspectives on Templatic Morphology, 2024
> Ṭur. I: cf. Classical Arabic (CA) našifa, Anatolian Arabic nəšəf → Ṭur. nošəf 'to dry (intr.)' ... more > Ṭur. I: cf. Classical Arabic (CA) našifa, Anatolian Arabic nəšəf → Ṭur. nošəf 'to dry (intr.)' Arab. ii > Ṭur. II: AA ḥallaq → Ṭur. mḥaləq 'to throw' Arab iii > Ṭur. II: CA ʕāwana, AA ʕēwan → Ṭur. mʕawən 'to help' Arab. iv > Ṭur III: CA aslama → Ṭur. masləm 'to hand over; to betray' 1 We have no exact information regarding the period when Arabic began to be actively used in Eastern Anatolia, esp. in Tur Abdin. According to S. Prochazka, "political history indicates that the core of the Arabic-speaking sedentary population, i. e. the speakers of the qǝltu dialects, may have settled in SE Anatolia during the 7 th and early 10 th centuries, when the region was under the stable control of Arab dynasties like the ʕAbbāsids and Ḥamdānids" (Procházka 2018:159 and references therein). 2 Throughout the paper, we follow E. Coghill's (2015) labelling system: Arabic stem numbers are written in lower case, while Ṭuroyo/Aramaic stems are written in upper case. In general, in Western scholarship, uppercase roman numerals are used to label the Arabic stems.
Journal of Semitic Studies, 2020
Versions of the folktale Zêrka Zêra (in Kurdish)/Stērka Zerá (in Ṭuroyo) circulate throughout sou... more Versions of the folktale Zêrka Zêra (in Kurdish)/Stērka Zerá (in Ṭuroyo) circulate throughout southeastern Anatolia. The story belongs to a widely-disseminated tale type, the ‘Bear's Wife’, which concerns a young woman who is abducted by a bear (or other wilderness creature) and is forced to spawn and rear his children before escaping or being rescued. The following Ṭuroyo version was recorded during the 2018 winter field season of the Russian expedition to Ṭur Abdin in the village of Ḥaḥ/Anıtlı from a speaker of the dialect of Bequsyone. It represents the first scholarly publication not only of the Ṭuroyo version, but of any version of this folktale. In addition to the folktale and a translation, the study includes a glossary of the vocabulary used within the text, reflecting some Ṭuroyo words that have not been documented elsewhere. The paper also discusses the motifs of the Stērka Zerá folktale according to the standard classification scheme of folk motifs.
Aramaic Studies, Issue 2, 2022
This article examines a Syriac erotic binding spell, 'Binding of a Husband'. We provide a text-cr... more This article examines a Syriac erotic binding spell, 'Binding of a Husband'. We provide a text-critical edition of this spell based on three manuscripts and reconsider previous editions and translations. We also try to establish the aim of the text and its place in the Syriac magical tradition. For this purpose, the evidence from modern Syriac magic manuscripts as well as from other pieces of Syriac literature is addressed. In addition, we discuss possible parallels for 'Binding of a Husband' beyond the Syriac literature.
Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022), 2022
In this paper, we would like to present a popular Kurdish folk song, Metran Îsa, performed in Kur... more In this paper, we would like to present a popular Kurdish folk song, Metran Îsa, performed in Kurmanji and Ṭuroyo (Surayt) by an Aramaic-speaking woman, Nisane Ergün (NE). Our performer lives in the Mardin province of Turkey in the vicinity of Kerboran (Turkish: Dargeçit) and belongs to the religious minority of Syriac Orthodox Christians. The number of Syriac Orthodox Christians in this region (also called Ṭur Abdin) is approximately 2,000-3,000. Ṭuroyo (endonym Surayt), an unwritten Neo-Aramaic (Semitic) language, is the first language for most of them. Almost every member of the community above thirty years old is also familiar with Kurdish (Kurmanji), but the level of command varies from native to elementary depending on age and place of living. The Moscow research group under the supervision of Sergey Loesov started its expeditions into the region in the winter of 2018. Our primary task is to collect the material for further documentation and description of the language. As a secondary goal, we occupy ourselves with oral literature by studying motives and characters of the stories we hear from our consultants (see for example the commentary on motives in Häberl et al. 2020). Our first meeting with Nisane took place on January 14, 2018, in the village Ḥaḥ (Turkish: Anıtlı), where she stayed at her daughter's place during the Feast of the Virgin of the Crops (Syriac: ʕēḏā d yāldaṯ ʔalāhā d ʕal zarʕē). That time she spontaneously told us several fairy tales and stories about local saints, and since then we regularly came back to her to make more recordings: so far Nisane has contributed most of the material to our corpus, gathered in 2018-19. She is eighty-seven years old, born in 1933 in the village Bequsyone (Turkish: Alagöz). After marriage, she moved to a neighboring settlement called Derqube (Turkish: Karagöl). Her mother tongue is Ṭuroyo (Surayt), and she also speaks Kurmanji fluently as her second language. The culture of storytelling was thriving in the community of Syriac Christians until the electrification of the region and the arrival of television in the 1980s. The inhabitants of a village We would like to thank our Ṭuroyo consultants Efrem Aydın and Ilyas Iranlı, Khanna Omarkhali, with 1 whom we discussed the Kurmanji version of the text, and our colleague and friend Michael Sims, who corrected the English style of the paper and the translations of the song as well as made numerous helpful suggestions during our work.
Journal of Semitic Studies, Volume 65, Issue 2, September 2020, pp. 473–493., 2020
Versions of the folktale Zêrka Zêra (in Kurdish)/Stērka Zerá (in Ṭuroyo) circulate throughout sou... more Versions of the folktale Zêrka Zêra (in Kurdish)/Stērka Zerá (in Ṭuroyo) circulate throughout southeastern Anatolia. The story belongs to a widely-disseminated tale type, the ‘Bear's Wife’, which concerns a young woman who is abducted by a bear (or other wilderness creature) and is forced to spawn and rear his children before escaping or being rescued. The following Ṭuroyo version was recorded during the 2018 winter field season of the Russian expedition to Ṭur Abdin in the village of Ḥaḥ/Anıtlı from a speaker of the dialect of Bequsyone. It represents the first scholarly publication not only of the Ṭuroyo version, but of any version of this folktale. In addition to the folktale and a translation, the study includes a glossary of the vocabulary used within the text, reflecting some Ṭuroyo words that have not been documented elsewhere. The paper also discusses the motifs of the Stērka Zerá folktale according to the standard classification scheme of folk motifs.
The note deals with future-time readings of the Perfect in Turoyo, an Eastern Ar-amaic language o... more The note deals with future-time readings of the Perfect in Turoyo, an Eastern Ar-amaic language of south-eastern Turkey. The Perfect of Turoyo is a tense-aspect form whose etymology is not trivial for PERFECT (in the sense of linguistic typology) and whose meaning has not yet been described closely enough.
Book Reviews by Nikita Kuzin
Conference Presentations by Nikita Kuzin
HSE Summer School Areal Linguistics and Languages of Russia 2018, 2018
The poster examines optional flagging of transitive nominal subjects in Ṭuroyo. We have gathered ... more The poster examines optional flagging of transitive nominal subjects in Ṭuroyo. We have gathered sentences with nominal subjects occurring with transitive verbs, from the oral corpus of Ṭuroyo. The first sample is analyzed in the exploratory fashion, in order to establish which variables are correlated with the presence or absence of flagging. On the basis of the second sample, we are trying to establish the statistical significance of the correlation between word order and agent flagging.
52nd Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, 2019
Our objective was to examine the distribution data on two pairs of possessive NPs in the Neo-Aram... more Our objective was to examine the distribution data on two pairs of possessive NPs in the Neo-Aramaic language Ṭuroyo, using the corpus of approx. 0.5 million tokens.
Ṭuroyo has three regular verbal stems -I, II and III. There are also three corresponding «passive... more Ṭuroyo has three regular verbal stems -I, II and III. There are also three corresponding «passive» stems. 1
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Books by Nikita Kuzin
Papers by Nikita Kuzin
Book Reviews by Nikita Kuzin
Conference Presentations by Nikita Kuzin