about
Anatolia, Caucasus, Iran, Mesopotamia have been the melting pot of cultures and languages of various families (Altaic, East and West Caucasian, Indo-European, Kartvelian, Semitic, among else) for millenia.
Understanding these languages, the sources of variation, the areas of contact in this geographical region opens insights to the human past, sharpens our perspective towards the Orient.
The aim of the present resource is to provide a general linguistic audience with snippets of the languages/grammars of this region, with a focus on contemporary language use, on the understanding of interactions between languages and the creation of areal profiles in grammar.
This resource is addressed to linguistics students and linguists, as well as to linguistically informed scholars of the humanities who wish to learn more about the languages of this region.
The ultimate target is not a full-fledged introduction to the invidual grammars, but rather attacting attention to phenomena of interest, also providing recommendations for further research, basic grammars, dictionaries, and resources, useful text collections for further study, references to teaching material for learning the language.
The present resource is a collaborative product of the LACIM network, a European research network on linguistics and languages of the Anatolia, Caucasus, Iran and Mesopotamia.
A first set of language series was launched in 2021, as part of a joint course offered to the students of the Universities of Bamberg, Cambridge, Cyprus, Göttingen, Inalco Paris, Paris III, and the Russian State University of Humanities.
Course poster (pdf file)
Course summary (pdf file)
The design of the present resource used ideas developed within the project Glottothèque: Ancient Indo-European Languages online (by Saverio Dalpedri, Götz Keydana, and Stavros Skopeteas at the University of Göttingen).
The targets, contents and design of the LACIM glottothèque differ in various ways from this earlier project, reflecting the ideas of the editors of the LACIM network, who carry the entire responsibility for the contents of the present glottothèque.
The language series present a selection of grammatical snippets, which are ordered in the following sections in order to facilitate navigation within and between languages. Beyond this parallel architecture, the contents of the individual series vary considerably, depending on the relevant aspects of the language at issue and the linguistic or didactic approaches of the lecturers:
introductory
snippets on the language and its speakers, sociolinguistic and dialectal variation, language family, history of the language and the people, sources of evidence and writing practices, outlines of the typological profile, sources for the study of the languagephonology
snippets on segmental inventory, vowels and consonants, illustrative sound examples, phonological phenomena, syllabic structure, word stress, intonation.morphology
snippets on the morphological templates of inflectional categories, affix order, morphological processes, outlines of inflectional categoriessyntax
snippets on clause structure, exciting constructions, argument structure, ergativity, word order, information structure or speech acts and syntax, clausal embeddingtexts
sample texts with linguistic discussion, introductions to related corpus resources
The editorial team
glottothèque
people
editors
University of Cyprus, Nicosia
Université Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris
Russian Academy of Science
lecturers
Armenian
Dargwa
Nina Sumbatova
(Russian Academy of Science)
Georgian
Svetlana Berikashvili
(Ilia State University),
Lena Borise
(Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics),
Nino Doborjginidze
(Ilia State University),
Diana Kakashvili
(Ivane Javakishvili Tbilisi State University),
Stavros Skopeteas
(University of Göttingen)
Kurdish
Geoffrey Haig
(University of Bamberg),
Masoud Mohammadirad
(University of Cambridge),
Ergin Öpengin
(University of Kurdistan Hewlêr, University of Cambridge)
Neo-Aramaic
Geoffrey Khan
(University of Cambridge),
Dorota Molin
(University of Cambridge),
Paul Noorlander
(University of Cambridge)
Turkish
Christiane Bulut
(University of Cyprus, Nicosia)
Stilianos Irakleous
(University of Cyprus, Nicosia)
Maria Petrou
(Justus-Liebig-University of Giessen)
registration and forum
Interested students and researchers are very welcome to participate to the course meetings! You can receive the announcements of the meetings with the lecturers including connection details as well as further relevant announcements for the course by subscribing to the
LACIM 2021/2022 course: mailing list
We set up a forum within the website of the LACIM network in order to discuss with the lecturers during the preparation of the meetings. Participants are welcome to use this forum to start discussions, write comments about the teaching units, ask the lectures for further advice or information that is not covered by the teaching material or make suggestions for any relevant topic
To use this tool, please click the button below to get to the website of the forum. At your first visit, you will need to subscribe (click on "Inscription") by an e-mail or a facebook/google account. After admission by the admin of the forum, you just connect with your credentials. Within the forum, you select "LACIM Course 2021-2022" and then the thread of the corresponding unit, e.g., Kurdish, in order to participate to the existing discussions or to add further topics.
LACIM 2021/2022 course: FORUM
instructions for contributors
Lecture series
Our aim is to introduce representative snippets within the basic layers of grammar (see above); the parallel design should enable navigation between languages.
It is clear that we do not target an exhaustive coverage of all layers and not complete introductions of each field as it is expected in a grammar;
within the present framework, a realistic target is to introduce exciting issues that are representative of various layers and to offer advice to students for relevant studies and ideas for further investigation.
Teaching units
A teaching unit should be short and maximally targeted (around 10 minutes, based on 5-10 slides), introducing the basic facts and pointing to proposals for analysis.
The audience of the lecture series is certainly diverse, including students of various levels of linguistic programs (BA/MA/PhD), students of philologies or other disciplines interested in the languages of the area. This diversity may be reflected in the composition of our teaching units too: some units may address general topics that do not require a linguistic background at all, e.g., the introduction of an interesting alphabet or the discussion of a complex language situation that results from historical developments and socio-economic transformations. Other teaching units may have a stronger import of linguistic background, e.g., integrating insights of modern typology, syntactic analyses of complex alignment patterns or exciting results of reconstruction or other related disciplines, e.g., epigraphy. Finally, this is a way to demonstrate the relevance of the insights of our disciplines.
Instructions for contributors (pdf file)
Stylesheet for presentation files (ppt file)
news
11.11.2021: The LACIM network scheduled an international conference to take place in Paris, November 16-18, 2022. You can find the conference announcement
here.
08.12.2021: A forum is set up within the LACIM website. Please join this forum in order to participate to the discussions.
31.01.2022: Next meeting: Meeting with the lecturers of the Armenian section, Monday, January 31, 4:30-6:00 p.m. (connection details to be distributed to registered users)
citation
Bulut, Christiane, Anaïd Donabédian-Demopoulos, Geoffrey Haig, Geoffrey Khan, Pollet Samvelian, Stavros Skopeteas, Nina Sumbatova (eds.) (2021), Glottothèque: Languages of the Anatolia, Caucasus, Iran, Mesopotamia; grammatical snippets online (electronic resource). Bamberg/Cambridge/Göttingen/Moskow/Nicosia/Paris: LACIM network, retrieved [Month] [Day], [Year], from https://spw.uni-goettingen.de/projects/lacim/.
