In contrast to most Middle and Modern Iranian languages, which have developed a preterite based on an ergative construction with the Old Iranian past passive participle, Ossetic has distinct formations for the intransitive and transitive preterite, and the latter has no close correlate in any… read more
The Crimean Gothic numerals sada ‘hundred’ and hazer ‘thousand’ are not of Persian origin, as long assumed in reference works, but loanwords from Alanic or another of the closely related Iranian languages spoken to the north of the Black Sea from the mid-1st millennium BC onwards. With its final… read more