Recycling a Mixed Language: Posha in Turkey

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article deals with a very interesting topic, provides new data and discusses them adequately, therefore it deserves to be published. An aspect that should be improved, before publishing the article, is the quality of the Armenian data quoted by the author.

Some remarks can be proposed:

1)    Western Armenian forms are quoted at least partially in Turkish orthography, this way of representing WA is very unusual, it would be better to represent WA forms according to a system of transcription already in use for this language or in IPA (for this last solution cfr. f.i. B. Vaux, The Phonology of Armenian, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998, p. 16). Moreover the transcription of Armenian is sometimes inconsistent, cfr. p. 7, l. 351 (< WA paxčel), but p. 7 l. 337 (< WA č'ur), but the sound is the same (affricate postalveolar voiceless aspirate), in the standard language the grapheme as well is the same <չ>․  It would be better p'axč'il, also considering the fact that the infinitive in -el for this verb is only EA.

2)    WA (as a standard and literary language) can be only a very general point of reference for comparison, more realistic would be a comparison with dialectal Western Armenian forms; f. i. p. 7, l. 344 har < (WA hajr), better har (< WA hayr), but in any case hayr is only the literary form, har is very common in Western Armenian dialects. If the author does not want to enter in these details, he/she should point out that the comparison with Armenian data is simplified and based on standard WA which however can be hardly considered the source of the Armenian forms present in PoC. The whole scientific Armenian lexicography (including dialectal dictionaries) are now available here: http://www.nayiri.com/search?dt=HY_HY&query=%D5%B0%D5%A1%D5%B5%D6%80&l=hy_LB

For a first orientation in the inflection of Armenian dialects cfr. Greppin, J.A.; Khachaturian, A. (1986). A Handbook of Armenian Dialectology.Delmar (New York): Caravan Books, or the more comprehensive Łaribyan, A. (1953). Hay barbaṙagitutʿyun (Armenian Dialectology). Erevan: Haykakan SSṘ Petakan Heraka mankavaržakan instituti tparan.

3)    p. 7 l. 352:  anal 'make' (< WA anel), standard WA has ənel, anel is EA.

4)    p. 8, ll. 365ff: it would be interesting to know if in the plural markers the Armenian allomorphy (-er for monosyllabic words and -ner for plurisyllabic words) is preserved in PoC

5)    p. 9. example n. 6:  an is glossed "this" and as is glossed "that", in Western Armenian dialects we find the contrary, i.e. an "that" and as "this" (innovation of PoC or mistake of the author?)

6)    in the same example mez, we would expect medz (in PoC Arm. dz > z or mistake?)

7)    p. 10, l. 21:  -en cannot be considered the ablative of Lomavren and WA, being -n the definite article, the real marker of the ablative is only -e

8)    p. 10, l. 430: Lomavren case system is "sympler" respect to Lomavren, perhaps  PoC case system is "sympler" respect to Lomavren

9)    p. 10 l. 434: if the syncretism between nominative and accusative was present already in Lomavren and in Armenian (as the author correctly maintains), the statement that it could have been "further fostered by Turkish" results incomprehensible.

10)                  p. 10 example n. 8a: (cf. WA ga ka), ga ka does not exist, the right form is gu ka (identical to PoC)

11)                  p. 10 example n. 8b: bargel-i =yem is compared with EA parrkelu em, but a confront with WA baṙgil would be more consistent; as for a future in -elu + "to be", it existed for example in the dialect of Karin and not only in eastern dialects of Armenian.

12)                  p. 10 example n. 8c; bahe is compared with WA bahi, but imperative forms in -e, matching exactly the PoC form, can be found in western Armenian dialects (again in Karin).

13)                  p. 12 example n. 12: the comparison of č-udi with EA č-uti seems phonetically less convincing than a comparison with a western dialectal form such as č-ude

14)                  p. 14, example n. 16: šenk-er-i has to be corrected in šenk'-er-ə

15)                  p. 14, example n. 17b: this reanalyzis can be occurred in the ablative as well [[N -e]  -n] > [N -en].

16)                  p. 16, examples n. 22: it is not clear whether these forms are WA or EA. In aydz-i gat (better aydz-i gat') the phonetic shape of the words is WA, but vaʁn arravotyan (better vaʁn aṙavotyan) is clearly EA (WA vaʁn aṙavodyan), finally both in WA and EA we have yerek'šapt'i, while yerekshabti with -b- (as in the orthographic spelling) is not in use.

17)                  p. 16, l. 668: attribute ,is   >  attribute, is

18)                  p. 16, l. 669:  is now Armenian/Turkish origin > is now of Armenian/Turkish origin

19)                  p. 17, l. 719: Turkish.. > Turkish.

20)                  p. 18, ll. 783-784: Finck (1907) could not claim that 68% of the items contained in the Swadesh-100 list are of pre-Armenian origin, because Franz Nikolaus Finck died in 1910 and Morris Swadesh was born in 1909 and elaborated his list in the Forties! The information is probably from Scala 2014.

Author Response

We greatly appreciate the time and care you and the reviewers invested in the previous version of our manuscript entitled “Recycling a Mixed Language: Posha in Turkey”. We have carefully attended to the reviewer inquiries and recommendations, and feel they have greatly strengthened the paper. We are submitting this revised manuscript for your consideration in the journal Languages. Please see below our responses explaining how we addressed your comments and suggestions in the manuscript. We hope that we have sufficiently addressed each of the important recommendations.

Point 1: Western Armenian forms are quoted at least partially in Turkish orthography, this way of representing WA is very unusual, it would be better to represent WA forms according to a system of transcription already in use for this language or in IPA (for this last solution cfr. f.i. B. Vaux, The Phonology of Armenian, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998, p. 16). Moreover the transcription of Armenian is sometimes inconsistent, cfr. p. 7, l. 351 (< WA paxčel), but p. 7 l. 337 (< WA č'ur), but the sound is the same (affricate postalveolar voiceless aspirate), in the standard language the grapheme as well is the same <չ>․  It would be better p'axč'il, also considering the fact that the infinitive in -el for this verb is only EA.

Point 2: WA (as a standard and literary language) can be only a very general point of reference for comparison, more realistic would be a comparison with dialectal Western Armenian forms; f. i. p. 7, l. 344 har < (WA hajr), better har (< WA hayr), but in any case hayr is only the literary form, har is very common in Western Armenian dialects. If the author does not want to enter in these details, he/she should point out that the comparison with Armenian data is simplified and based on standard WA which however can be hardly considered the source of the Armenian forms present in PoC. The whole scientific Armenian lexicography (including dialectal dictionaries) are now available here: http://www.nayiri.com/search?dt=HY_HY&query=%D5%B0%D5%A1%D5%B5%D6%80&l=hy_LB

For a first orientation in the inflection of Armenian dialects cfr. Greppin, J.A.; Khachaturian, A. (1986). A Handbook of Armenian Dialectology.Delmar (New York): Caravan Books, or the more comprehensive Łaribyan, A. (1953). Hay barbaṙagitutʿyun (Armenian Dialectology). Erevan: Haykakan SSṘ Petakan Heraka mankavaržakan instituti tparan.

Author’s Response 1 & 2: We are very grateful to the reviewer for pointing these two methodological problems out to us and for providing us with solutions. First, we have adopted Vaux’s (1998) system for transcription (albeit with a tiny modification; we cannot type the tie-bar for affricates in the journal’s template) and re-typed everything. Second, we have made it clear that with WA we do not mean the literary form of Western Armenian. We use WA when the form of a word appears across WA dialects with no substantial differences in its form. When the inter-dialectal difference becomes relevant, we note the name of the specific Western Armenian dialect. The information can be seen on footnote 3. 

Point 3: p. 7 l. 352:  anal 'make' (< WA anel), standard WA has ənel, anel is EA.

Author’s response 3: we corrected it as follow: anal ‘make’ (< WA ənel,; WA.dial (Erzurum) enel; see Greppin and Khachaturian1986:91; E(astern)A(rmenian) anel)

Point 4: p. 8, ll. 365ff: it would be interesting to know if in the plural markers the Armenian allomorphy (-er for monosyllabic words and -ner for plurisyllabic words) is preserved in PoC

Author’s response 4:  Unfortunately our database does not reveal any form to confirm this; a detailed study with a larger lexical database is needed to provide a definite conclusion.

Point 5: p. 9. example n. 6:  an is glossed "this" and as is glossed "that", in Western Armenian dialects we find the contrary, i.e. an "that" and as "this" (innovation of PoC or mistake of the author?)

Author’s response 5: Thank you for correcting this. It was a mistake. We corrected this as as “this” and an “that”)

Point 6: in the same example mez, we would expect medz (in PoC Arm. dz > z or mistake?)

Author’s response 6: We double-checked it, the speaker pronounces it as mez.

Point 7: p. 10, l. 21:  -en cannot be considered the ablative of Lomavren and WA, being -n the definite article, the real marker of the ablative is only -e

Author’s response7: This is definitely true; many apologies for this trivial mistake; we have rewritten the relevant section; including your suggestion on the renalaysis of -e + -n as -en (point 15).   

Point 8: p. 10, l. 430: Lomavren case system is "sympler" respect to Lomavren, perhaps  PoC case system is "sympler" respect to Lomavren

Author’s response 8: Truly, PoC case system is simpler with respect to that of Lomavren. We corrected this on the text.

       Point 9: p. 10 l. 434: if the syncretism between nominative and accusative was present already in Lomavren and in Armenian (as the author correctly maintains), the statement that it could have been "further fostered by Turkish" results incomprehensible.

Author’s response 9: Thanks for pointing this out to us. We deleted the relevant section. 

Point 10: p. 10 example n. 8a: (cf. WA ga ka), ga ka does not exist, the right form is gu ka (identical to PoC)

Author’s response 10: We corrected it as WA gu ka.

Point 11: p. 10 example n. 8b: bargel-i =yem is compared with EA parrkelu em, but a confront with WA baṙgil would be more consistent; as for a future in -elu + "to be", it existed for example in the dialect of Karin and not only in eastern dialects of Armenian.

Author’s response 11: Many thanks for this pointer. We added this information to the paper.

Point 12 p. 10 example n. 8c; bahe is compared with WA bahi, but imperative forms in -e, matching exactly the PoC form, can be found in western Armenian dialects (again in Karin).

Author’s response 12: We corrected it as WA bahe.

Point 13: p. 12 example n. 12: the comparison of č-udi with EA č-uti seems phonetically less convincing than a comparison with a western dialectal form such as č-ude

Author’s response 13: We corrected as WA č-ude.

Point 14: p. 14, example n. 16: šenk-er-i has to be corrected in šenk'-er-ə

Author’s response 14: We corrected as šenk'-er-ə.

Point 15: p. 14, example n. 17b: this reanalyzis can be occurred in the ablative as well [[N -e]  -n] > [N -en].

Author’s response 15: Please see our response to Point 7 for an answer.

Point 15: p. 16, examples n. 22: it is not clear whether these forms are WA or EA. In aydz-i gat (better aydz-i gat') the phonetic shape of the words is WA, but vaʁn arravotyan (better vaʁn aṙavotyan) is clearly EA (WA vaʁn aṙavodyan), finally both in WA and EA we have yerek'šapt'i, while yerekshabti with -b- (as in the orthographic spelling) is not in use.

Author’s response 16: We now provide only the WA forms.

Point 17-19:  orthographic mistakes           

Author’s response: We corrected them

Point 20: p. 18, ll. 783-784: Finck (1907) could not claim that 68% of the items contained in the Swadesh-100 list are of pre-Armenian origin, because Franz Nikolaus Finck died in 1910 and Morris Swadesh was born in 1909 and elaborated his list in the Forties! The information is probably from Scala 2014.

Author’s response: We corrected as “ Scala (2014: 237) claims that  68% of the items documented by Finck (1907) contained in the Swadesh-100 list are all of pre-Armenian origin; notably Indo-Aryan.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a fascinating contribution, documenting a new mixed language spoken in Çankırı. The authors' tracing the possible sources of the grammatical/lexical elements in Posha of Çankırı is impeccable. It also reveals important insights on the history of Lomavren (cf. the indicative negation marker in PoC being identical to the one in WA and different from the source language Lomavren). On the pdf attached, I only had a few minor questions or comments, and indicated typos and language suggestions.

Overall, I was very pleased to read this paper. Thank you to the authors!

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We greatly appreciate the time and care you and the reviewers invested in the previous version of our manuscript entitled “Recycling a Mixed Language: Posha in Turkey”. We have carefully attended to the reviewer inquiries and recommendations, and feel they have greatly strengthened the paper. We are  submitting this revised manuscript for your consideration in the journal Languages. Please see below our responses explaining how we addressed your comments and suggestions in the manuscript. We hope that we have sufficiently addressed each of the important recommendations.

Many thanks, again, for your time and consideration.

With best wishes,

Authors

• In situation where there is speakers’ partial resistance to language shift > In situations where speakers have partial resistance to language shift
• …have been gathered > were gathered
• …maintain > that maintain
• follow > follows
• According to us > We believe that
• Posha of Çankırı: grammar overview > Grammar overview of PoC
• not one thing is clear that Indo-Arya > not one thing that is clear is that Indo-Arya
• newly coined > later appeared

Authors’ response to (1)-(8) we corrected these mistakes.

• in 9a, you have an example with "ox" which also gets -diy

but chicken gets -er.

Maybe rephrase the sentence right above (1). Maybe what you wanted to say is that human nouns and nouns whose referents are inalienably possessed by humans get -diy and elsewhere we may have -diy or -er?

Author’s response: Many apologies for the inaccurate conclusions in the previous draft. We have now checked with a larger database. In fact diy- appears on multisyllabic words whereas -er appears on monosyllabic ones.   

• I added the numbers on page 8. Thank you for correction.
• I corrected it as hav-er-I
• any examples where a definite object/proper name is in the object position? One of the source languages, Turkish, has DoM. So, it would be worth showing that the object case is uniformly null, hence no DoM effects.

Author’s response: We do not have any examples unfortunately but we would like  to look into it.  Many thanks for this question.

• See diga-n in example (14) Other examples of definite article marking singular animal nouns have been identified: gadun < gadu+n “the cat”; havn < hav+n “the chicken”.
• I corrected it as PoC.
• You are right, for example çidesna “I didn’t see” .

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

See the attached file.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We greatly appreciate the time and care you and the reviewers invested in the previous version of our manuscript entitled “Recycling a Mixed Language: Posha in Turkey”. We have carefully attended to the reviewer inquiries and recommendations, and feel they have greatly strengthened the paper. We are submitting this revised manuscript for your consideration in the journal Languages. Please see below our responses explaining how we addressed your comments and suggestions in the manuscript. We hope that we have sufficiently addressed each of the important recommendations.

Many thanks, again, for your time and consideration.

With best wishes,

Authors

Point 1: Firstly, some concepts are not explained in the immediate context they first appear in but later in the text. This is the case with the abbreviation INFL which appears in the very first page but is explained on page 2.

Author’s response: Thanks for pointing this out to us. We provided explanations for such abbreviations the first time they appear.

Point 2: Second, Section 5.1 requires some elaboration. It is stated that the largest percentage of Posha vocabulary is of Armenian origin. However, there are no statistics provided. We do not know how many words have been taken into consideration, how the data is gathered. We need more concrete data. For example, have the authors compiled a Swadesh list to observe the origins of basic vocabulary in the language? What are the actual percentages the authors refer to and how are these calculated? The methodology should be more clearly explained and some concrete statistics should be provided.

Author’s response: We did not compile a Swadesh list, unfortunately. We reached the conclusion we presented in the article merely by counting all the lexical items in the annotated data and by comparing the number of words of Armenian origin to Turkish ones. Because this plain counting may also create methodological problems (issues with genre; code-switching etc.), we choose to change what we wrote in the article as follows: “Impressionistically, words of Armenian origin dominate in all major lexical categories…”

Point 3: Third, I find the section on verbal morphosyntax highly sketchy. We only get to hear about clausal negation, but nothing about agreement patterns, Tense-Aspect-Modality systems. Why is this the case? Do the authors not have enough data on these or they do, but the data is not interesting or conclusive? Either way, they need to explain why they only refer to negation but nothing else. As such, the title verbal morphosyntax is too broad given the limited content of this section. This section requires elaboration.

Author’s response: We change the titles of the subsections in section 5. Thanks for pointing this out to us. We could not provide a more extensive sketch of PoC grammar because we did not have sufficient data to provide reliably conclusions on them. We hope to enrich our database in the future. We noted this problem in the article as well.

Point 4:  The authors, for example, take a look at compounding patterns to detect the Turkish or Armenian origins of the construction in Posha. There are certain patterns, which are typical to Altaic languages, such as nominalized embedded clauses or head final relative clause formation in the absence of relative pronouns. It would be nice to touch upon the absence or presence of such Altaic patterns in the language to understand the influence of Turkish.

Author’s response: We thank the reviewer for these suggestions. We hope to investigate them in the future with further speakers and with further data.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf