Teachers: Professor 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 2023-24: Thursdays from 17:00-18:00 UK Time (you can check time-zone comparisons on sites such as this one)
Class Length: 2-term class (Hilary Term 2024-Trinity Term 2024) (Oxford dates of term are available on the University website)
Class Description: This class 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 class 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 and 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.