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Ossetic Иронау, Ironau
Spoken in:	Russia  Georgia  Turkey
Region:	North Ossetia (in Russian Federation)  South Ossetia (in Georgia)
Total speakers:	c. 525,0001
Language family:	Indo-European  Indo-Iranian   Iranian    Eastern     Northeastern      Scythian       Western        Ossetic
Official status
Official language in:	North Ossetia,
Regulated by:	no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	os
ISO 639-2:	oss
ISO 639-3:	oss
Ossetic text from a book published in 1935. Part of an alphabetic list of proverbs. Latin script
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

The Ethnolinguistic patchwork of the modern Caucasus - CIA map

Ossetic or Ossetian (Ирон ӕвзаг, Iron ævzag or Иронау, Ironau), also sometimes called Ossete,² is an East Iranian language spoken in Ossetia, a region on the slopes of the Caucasus Mountains.

The area in Russia is known as North Ossetia-Alania, while the area south of the border is referred to as South Ossetia, recognized by Russia and Nicaragua as an independent state but by the rest of the international community as part of Georgia. Ossetian speakers number about 525,000, sixty percent of whom live in Alania, and ten percent in South Ossetia.^{citation needed}

History and classification

Ossetic is the spoken and literary language of the Ossetes, a people living in the central part of the Caucasus and constituting the basic population of the republic of North Ossetia-Alania, which belongs to the Russian Federation, and of the South Ossetia, which is de facto independent (belongs to the Georgian Republic according to most other states). Ossetic belongs to the Northern subgroup of the Eastern-Iranian group of the Indo-European family of languages. Thus, it is genetically related to the other Eastern-Iranian languages, e.g. Pashto and Yaghnobi.

From deep Antiquity (since the 7th-8th centuries B.C.), the languages of the Iranian group were distributed in a vast territory including present-day Iran (Persia), Central Asia, and Southern Russia. Ossetic is the sole survivor of the northeastern branch of Iranian languages known as Scythian. The Scythian group included numerous tribes, known in ancient sources as the Scythians, Massagetae, Saka, Sarmatians, Alans and Roxolans. The more easterly Khorezmians and the Sogdians were also closely affiliated, in linguistic terms.

Ossetian, together with Kurdish, Tati and Talyshi, is one of the main Iranian languages with a sizeable community of speakers in the Caucasus. It is descended from Alanic, the language of the Alans, medieval tribes emerging from the earlier Sarmatians. It is believed to be the only surviving descendant of a Sarmatian language. The closest genetically related language is the Yaghnobi language of Tajikistan, the only other living member of the Northeastern Iranian branch.³⁴ Ossetic has a plural formed by the suffix -ta, a feature it shares with Yaghnobi, Sarmatian and the now-extinct Sogdian; this is taken as evidence of a formerly wide-ranging Iranian-language dialect continuum on the Central Asian steppe. The Greek-derived names of ancient Iranian tribes in fact reflect this pluralization, e.g. Saromatae (Σαρομάται) and Masagetae (Μασαγέται).⁵

The evidence for Medieval Ossetic

The earliest known written sample of Ossetic is an inscription which dates from the 10th to 12th centuries CE and was found near the River Bolshoi Zelenchuk at Arkhyz. The text is written in the Greek alphabet, with special digraphs.

—ΣΑΧΗΡΗ ΦΟΥΡΤ ΧΟΒΣ
ΗΣΤΟΡΗ ΦΟΥΡΤ ΠΑΚΑΘΑΡ
ΠΑΚΑΘΑΡΗ ΦΟΥΡΤ ΑΝΠΑΛΑΝ
ΑΝΠΑΛΑΝΗ ΦΟΥΡΤ ΛΑΚ
ΑΝΗ ΤΖΗΡΘΕ

This transliterates as

—Saxiri Furt Xovs
Istori Furt Bæqætar
Bæqætari Furt Æmbalan
Æmbalani Furt Lak
Ani čirtī

This translates to English as "K., son of S., son of I., son of B., son of A.; [this is] their monument." ⁶

The only other extant record of Proto-Ossetic are the two lines of "Alanic" phrases appearing in the Theogony of John Tzetzes, a twelfth-century Byzantine poet and grammarian:

—Τοῖς ἀλανοῖς προσφθέγγομαι κατά τήν τούτων γλῶσσαν
Καλή ημέρα σου αὐθεντα μου αρχόντισσα πόθεν εἶσαι

Ταπαγχὰς μέσφιλι χσινὰ κορθὶ κάντα καὶ τ’άλλα
ἂν ὃ ἒχη ἀλάνισσα παπὰν φίλον ἀκούσαις ταῦτα
οὐκ αἰσχύνεσσι αὐθέντρια μου νὰ μου γαμὴ τὸ μουνί σου παπᾶς

τὸ φάρνετζ κίντζι μέσφιλι καίτζ φουὰ σαοῦγγε

⁷

The italicized portions above are Ossetic. Going beyond a direct transliteration of the Greek text, scholars have attempted a phonological reconstruction using the Greek as clues, thus, while τ (tau) would usually be given the value "t," it instead is "d," which is thought to be the way the early Ossetes would have pronounced it. The scholarly transliteration of the Alanic phrases is: "dæ ban x^wærz,mæ sfili, (æ)xsinjæ kurθi kændæ" and "du farnitz, kintzæ mæ sfili, kajci fæ wa sawgin?"; equivalents in modern Ossetic would be "Dć bon xwarz, me’fšini ‘xšinć, kurdigćj dć?"^{citation needed} and "(De’) f(s)arm neč(ij), kinźi œfšini xœcc(œ) (ku) fœwwa sawgin". The passage translates as:

—The Alans I greet in their language:
"Good day to you my lord's lady, where are you from?"
"Good day to you my lord's lady, where are you from?" and other things:
When an Alan woman takes a priest as a lover, you might hear this:
"Aren't you ashamed, my lordly lady, that your cunt is being fucked by a priest?"
"Aren't you ashamed, my lady, to have a love affair with the priest?"

⁸⁹

There are also recently found marginalia to Greek religious books with some parts (like headlines) of the book translated into Old Ossetic.

It is theorized that during the Proto-Ossetic phase, Ossetic underwent a process of phonological change conditioned by a Rhythmusgesetz or "Rhythm-law" whereby nouns were divided into two classes, those heavily or lightly stressed. "Heavy-stem" nouns possessed a "heavy" long vowel or diphthong, and were stressed on the first-occurring syllable of this type; "light-stem" nouns were stressed on their final syllable. This is precisely the situation observed in the earliest (though admittedly scanty) records of Ossetic presented above.¹⁰ This situation also obtains in Modern Ossetic, although the emphasis in Digor is also affected by the "openness" of the vowel.¹¹ The trend is also found in a Jassic glossary dating from 1422.¹²

Dialects

There are two important dialects: Iron and Digor—the former being the more widely spoken. Written Ossetian may be immediately recognized by its use of the æ, a letter to be found in no other language using the Cyrillic alphabet. A third dialect of Ossetic, Jassic, was formerly spoken in Hungary. The overwhelming majority of Ossetes speak the Iron dialect, and the literary language is based on it. The creator of the Ossetic literary language is the national poet Kosta Xetagurov (1859-1906).³

Grammar

According to Ossetic researcher V.I. Abaev,

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica 2006¹³ Ossetic preserves many archaic features of Old Iranian, such as eight cases and verbal prefixes. The eight cases are not, however, the original Indo-Iranian cases, which were eroded due to pronunciation changes. The modern cases, except the nominative, are derived from a single surviving oblique case that was reanalyzed into seven new cases by Ossetic speakers.^{citation needed} This is reminiscent of the Tocharian languages.

Please help improve this section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page. (May 2008)

Writing system

The first page of the first issue of the Ossetic newspaper "Ræstdzinad". Sjögren's Cyrillic alphabet. 1923

Prior to the Russian conquest, Ossetic was reportedly an unwritten language. After the Russian conquest Ossetians used Cyrillic script: the first Ossetic book being published in Cyrillic letters in 1798. At the same time Georgian script was used in some regions to the south of Caucasian mountains: in 1820 I.Yalguzidze published an alphabetic primer, modifying Georgian alphabet with 3 special characters. That Georgian-based script was in use in the territory of South Ossetia (Georgian autonomy) in 1937–1954.

The modern Cyrillic alphabet was created by a Russian scientist of Finnish origin Andreas Sjögren in 1844: there were separate letters for each sound in that alphabet (much like in the modern Abkhaz alphabet). After a brief experiment with the Latin alphabet, Soviet authorities in 1937 returned to the Cyrillic alphabet, with digraphs introduced to replace most diacritics (while Georgian-based script was then introduced in South Ossetia and used there until 1954). The "one nation - two alphabets" issue caused an uprising in South Ossetia in the year 1951 demanding reunification of the script.

The modern Cyrillic alphabet, used since 1937, with values for the Iron dialect in the IPA. Letters in parentheses are not oficially in the alphabet but listed here to represent distinctive sounds:

In addition, the letters Ё, Ж, Ш, Щ, Ъ, Ь, Э, Ю, Я are in the alphabet, they are used to transcribe Russian loans.

The Latin alphabet (used 1923-1937):

In addition, the letters Š and Ž were used to transcribe Russian words.

The "weak" vowels æ IPA: [ɐ] and ы [ɨ] are extremely common in the language, a feature it shares with Persian.

Language usage

The first printed book in Ossetic appeared in 1798. The first newspaper, Iron Gazet, appeared on July 23 1906 in Vladikavkaz.

While Ossetic is the official language in both South and North Ossetia (along with Russian), its official use is limited to publishing new laws in Ossetic newspapers.

There are two daily newspapers in Ossetic: Ræstdzinad (Рæстдзинад, "Truth") in the North and Xurzærin (Хурзæрин, "The Rainbow") in the South. Some smaller newspapers, such as district newspapers, use Ossetic for some articles. There is a monthly magazine Max dug (Мах дуг, "Our era"), mostly devoted to contemporary Ossetic fiction and poetry.

Ossetic is taught in secondary schools for all pupils. Native Ossetic speakers also take courses in Ossetic literature.

See also

• Ossetia
• Alans
• North Ossetia-Alania

Notes

Bibliography

• Abaev, V.I. A grammatical sketch of Ossetic (Russian version)
• Abaev, V.I. Ossetian Language and Folklore, USSR Academy of Sciences, Moscow-Leningrad, 1949
• Arys-Djanaieva, Lora. Parlons Ossète. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2004, ISBN 2-7475-6235-2.
• Nasidze et al., Genetic Evidence Concerning the Origins of South and North Ossetians. Annals of Human Genetics 68 (6), 588-599(2004)

External links

Ossetic language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• [3].
• Ossetic language page (in Russian) at the Minority languages of Russia on the Net project
• History of the Ossetian writing system (in Russian) and a comprehensive table of characters
• Some materials in English and partly French
• Ossetic section of the Rosetta Project
• Omniglot - Ossetian (Ирон æвзаг / Дигорон æвзаг)