Contact Across the Iranian World: Curious Convergences between Kurdish and Balochi
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.46991/jil/2025.02.01Keywords:
Diachrony, Language Contact, Sound Change, Morphological Analogy, Comparative MethodAbstract
It has not gone unnoticed that the Balochi imperfective aspect marker a- is superficially similar in form to the Central Kurdish marker a- (e- in Kurdish orthography) and nearly identical in function. Micro variation shows further similarities. For instance, the way these formatives idiosyncratically attach to certain verbs: come, bring, etc. have striking similarities in both groups. Additionally, the forms of past imperfective and past conditional forms show further convergence with the Kurdish system, differing from the original constructions preserved in Gorani and Zazaki. In light of new data from Kurdish, I evaluate the prospect of a relationship between these formations and others, arguing that these constructions ultimately have different etymologies. However, their convergence is far from coincidence.
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