Linguistic Studies and Essays

Vol. 61 No. 1 (2023)
Articles

Armenian Stem Classes and Western-Middle Iranian Oblique Plural Case

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  • Marco Fattori
Marco Fattori
Università La Sapienza di Roma
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4454/ssl.v61i1.326

Published 2023-06-28

Keywords

  • Armenian,
  • Iranian,
  • Loanwords,
  • Stem Classes
Copyright Notice

Abstract

So far, no definitive explanation has been given for the fact that Iranian loanwords in Classical Armenian are very often assigned to a morphological class reflecting the corresponding Old Iranian declension. This has rightly been regarded as problematic because the loanwords entered Armenian in the Middle Iranian period, when Western Iranian dialects had already lost final syllables. In this article, it is argued that the correspondence between Armenian and Iranian stem vowels could be inferred from the Oblique Plural case, which probably preserved traces of the Old Iranian declension still in the 1st century AD.

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