Talyšsko-russko-azerbajdžanskij slovar' [Talyshi-Russian-Azerbaijani Dictionary] (review)

This dictionary of Northern Talyshi, an Iranian language of south-eastern Azerbaijan, represents the culmination of the late Novruzali Mamedov's long and influential career as a champion of Talyshi language and culture. Conceived as a reworking of the Northern Talyshi-Russian dictionary of Pirejko (1976), with over ten thousand entries it far surpasses its predecessor in size and provides the most detailed coverage of the Northern Talyshi lexicon so far available. A notable feature is the prominence given to illustrations of vocabulary items in their linguistic context; although Mamedov does not provide citations for every item, a high proportion of the headwords, collocations, and idioms collected here are accompanied by examples of their use drawn from contemporary journalism or texts presented in previous scholarship on Northern Talyshi; indeed, it would be possible to compile a basic grammar of the language solely on the basis of phrases drawn from this dictionary.

Mamedov also expands upon Pirejko (1976) by incorporating Azerbaijani translations alongside the Russian throughout, thus facilitating comparison between the vocabulary of Northern Talyshi and that of both its current superstrate languages. Essential morphological information is provided—each verb is listed in the infinitive followed by its various stems, while plural forms of nouns are given when these are unpredictable. Important derivational affixes are also listed in their own right. In the (uncommon) case of suppletive stem formation, cross-referencing entries reliably direct the user of the dictionary to the relevant headword; variant forms of lexemes are likewise cross-referenced. Dialect forms are labeled with their area of origin; the dialectal diversity existing within Northern Talyshi is discussed, albeit briefly, in the Russian-Azerbaijani bilingual introduction, which also treats such topics as the demographics of the Talysh region and the relationship between Northern Talyshi and the Talyshi varieties of Iran. All of this makes for a dictionary of great practical value to the student of Northern Talyshi.

A few minor shortcomings must be noted. Owing to the circumstances of this dictionary's composition, which straddled the readoption of the Latin alphabet for Azerbaijani and consequently for Talyshi, the entries are given in Latin characters (sometimes modified as in Azerbaijani) but in the Cyrillic alphabetical order; and as the sounds of Talyshi overlap substantially with those of Azerbaijani, the phonetic values of the Latin characters used are nowhere specified, though these may not be obvious to those unfamiliar with Azerbaijani orthography (e.g., <ǝ>) = [æ], <c> = [dƷ], <q> = [g]), and some characters do in fact differ in value between Azerbaijani and Northern Talyshi (e.g., <i> represents in the former and [&01DD] in the latter). The transcription used also unfortunately obscures the fact that the [u] of Northern Talyshi, although notably fronter than cardinal vowel 8 and the Azerbaijani [u], is reliably distinguished from the [y] that can be found in vocabulary borrowed from Azerbaijani; following Pirejko's practice, Mamedov uses a single character (i.e., <ü>) for both, thus missing the opportunity to mark this salient distinction. On occasion the constant switching between alphabets has allowed nonsense words to slip through (e.g., qr ǝzğ, for Russian 'mud; dirt', under the headword ÇIRK). A more serious error in the production stage resulted in my copy lacking several pages and containing duplicates of many more; this is hopefully an isolated case.

Despite these problematic features, with this volume Mamedov has made a significant contribution to Iranian linguistics and the study of his native region and culture. It is a valuable work of scholarship, which will be indispensable to all who take an interest in the Northern Talyshi language.