抄録
With the appearance of O. Jastrow (1967) and H. Ritter (1967-71), a general idea that vernaculars spoken in the Tur ‘Abdin form one homogeneous dialect proved to be an illusion. When examined carefully they show several dialectal variations. The research made in Jerusalem in 1978 about the dialect of the village Mzizah, of which Ritter does not give any material, revealed a striking phenomenon.
Of the two types of SPP, one without ayd (SPP1) is optionally used in Midin in regard to the words listed in Jastrow (pp. 54-56) and therefore it is a free variant of the other type of SPP (SPP2). But in Mzizah this is not the case. Nouns that take SPP1 cannot take SPP2, excepting a few words. So the relation between them is a complementary one.
Moreover a certain number of words, which I termed ‘nouns of kinship’, take SPP1 for the 2nd and 1st persons, but for the 3rd person they take not only SPP1 and SPP2 but also an article (D), in order to indicate the possessor of the 3rd pers. sg. (‘his, her’). According to the type of their distribution, nouns of kinship are classified into five classes here and other nouns taking SPP1 are listed at the end.
Thus in the case of nouns of kinship, the choice of SPP seems to depend on the mental distance of kinship from the person in question. This fact, new and hitherto unknown, gives Mzizah dialect a distinct place in that it uses D in place of SPP and that a factor other than a linguistic one plays an important role in the choice of SPP.
Village dialects of Turoyo, it may be said, need more exhaustive research and treatment.
[Correction] Bulletin of the Society for Near Eastern Studies in Japan Vol.23 No.2 (1980) pp.98d-98d
