Teachers: Prof Gilles Authier, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, & Dr Murad Suleymanov, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes
Class Level: Beginners (though background in Persian is an advantage)
Class Schedule 2021-22: Tuesdays @ 17:00-18:00 UK Time; yearlong course (Michaelmas-Trinity Terms)
Class Description: The course is an introduction to Judeo-Tat (or Juhuri), an Iranian language spoken historically in the Caucasus by a community known as ‘Mountain Jews’. Presently, due to emigration, the language is also spoken in Israel, Russia, and North America. The course takes a corpus-based approach with materials covering fundamental grammar. An introduction into Judeo-Tat history will be followed by an overview of phonology, spelling conventions, as well as basic grammatical notions, which will be accompanied by in-class activities. Some personal preparation will be expected from the participants, who will get to work with Judeo-Tat texts selected mainly from a corpus of folk narratives. Participants will be guided to develop skills to analyse the texts morphologically and syntactically (reading, translation, commentary), with occasional reference to Modern Persian and the Indo-European background of Tat languages in general. Literary Judeo-Tat, based on the dialect of Derbent, will serve as a reference point, but a couple of sessions will deal with non-standard (but closely related) varieties spoken elsewhere in the Caucasus.
Reference Materials:
-Authier, Gilles. 2012. Grammaire juhuri, ou judéo-tat, langue iranienne des juifs du Caucase de l’est. Wiesbaden: Reichert.
-Authier, Gilles. 2015. “Tat”. In: P. O. Müller, I. Ohnheiser, S. Olsen and F. Rainer, eds. Word-Formation. An International Handbook of the Languages of Europe. Berlin: DeGruyter. 3179–3196.
-Izgijaeva, Ėdėso. 2005. Татско-русский и русско-татский словарь. Татский язык горских евреев Кавказа [Tat-Russian and Russian-Tat dictionary. Tat language of the Mountain Jews of the Caucasus]. Makhachkala: Jupiter.
-Miller, Boris. 1932. “О кубинском говоре татского наречия горских евреев Кавказа” [On the Quba subdialect of the Tat language spoken by the Mountain Jews of the Caucasus]. Записки Института востоковедения Академии Наук СССР [Proceedings of the Institute of Oriental Studies in Academy of Science of the USSR] 1. 269–290.
-Miller, Vsevolod. 1892. Материалы для изучения еврейско-татского языка. Введение, тексты и словарь [Materials for study of the Judeo-Tat language. Introduction, texts, and dictionary]. Saint Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences.
-Zand, Michael. 1985. “The literature of the Mountain Jews of the Caucasus (Part 1)”. Soviet Jewish Affairs 15(2). 3–22.
-Zand, Michael. 1986. “The literature of the Mountain Jews of the Caucasus (Part 2)”. Soviet Jewish Affairs 16(1). 35–51.