The Udi Gospels

More than hundred years ago [108 years ago, to be exact], the Udi pope Semjon Bezhanov (assisted by his brother Mikhail Bezhanov) undertook the Sisyphean task to translate the most relevant parts of the New Testament, namely the four Gospels, into Udi, a (by number of its speakers) small Southeast Caucasian language spoken (by that time) in two villages [Nidzh and Vartashen, now Oguz] in Northern Azerbaijan. The Bezhanov manuscript of the Udi Gospels - which itself seems to be lost - came to the printhouse in Tbilisi in 1898 and was published as volume XXX of the famous series Sbornik Materialov dlja Opisanija Mestnostej i Plemen Kavkaza (SMOMPK) in 1902.

The present reediting of the Udi Gospels makes this unique text document again accessible to linguists interested in the studies of East Caucasian languages or in (General) Typology. The text can also serve as a tool for those who work in the fields of comparative Southeast Caucasian (Lezgian) linguistics (especially with respect to the lexicon). The Gospels are built upon (roughly) 1800 lexical entries which cover a major part of the Udi lexicon (though necessarily defined and confined by the contents of the Gospels). The present book is organized in the following way: Chapter 2 is an introduction to both the historical setting that underlies the production of the text and a (brief) survey of the structure of the Udi gospels. Chapter 3 gives the text of the Gospels with grammatical and lexical notes. Chapter 4 entails a comprehensive (but rather condensed) overview of the grammatical (paradigmatic) architecture of Udi that helps the reader to analyze all grammatical elements in the text. Chapter 5 is an index of all lexical forms found in the Gospels (names etc. excluded). This index can be used both as a simple Udi-English index and as an etymological index. This index is unique in that for the first time a larger (and motivated) section of the lexicon of an individual East Caucasian language is analyzed in a diachronic perspective. Chpater 6 is a lemmatized concordance which allows the reader to retrieve the lemmata of all inflected forms in the Gospels and to check a given word form in terms of a 'keyword in context concordance'. Finally, an English-Udi index is given in chapter 7.