The Origin of Differential Object Marking and Tripartite Alignment in Udi (East Caucasian)

Thanks to the discovery in Mount Sinai Monastery of the Albanian palimpsest, which contains fragments of the Bible in an ancient form of Udi, this language has become the earliest attested member of the East Caucasian family. However, due to its long evolution in contact with unrelated languages, both old and modern Udi show many characteristics unknown to their closest relatives, including Differential Object Marking. Combined with ergative case marking, this feature results in a rare ‘tripartite alignment’. After describing the case marking of arguments in Lezgian, modern dialects of Udi and the three non-East Caucasian languages of the area (Tat, Azeri and Armenian) showing Differential Object Marking, we examine the available Old Udi / Caucasian Albanian data, compare them with data from Old Armenian, Old Turkic and Middle Iranian, and try to assess the best candidate for the source of the Udi phenomenon in the light of what is known about its history in terms of contact and sociolinguistic dominance.