Harmatta János: Studies in the language of the Iranian tribes in South Russia - Magyar-görög tanulmányok 31. (1952)

I PROBLEMS AND TASKS After Miillenhoff’s fruitful activity1 it was Miller’s investigations2 that produced a great advance in-, the research on the language of the Iranian tribes in South Russia. The ancient inscriptions of the Pontic region were collected and edited by Latyshev,3 so that the fairly large number of names appearing in the inscriptions has become easily accessible to linguists. Miller had made a thorough study of Ossetian, a language still spoken in the Cau­casus, and on the basis of his expert knowledge of that tongue, he began to investigate the material of names appearing in the ancient inscriptions of South Russia. His work was crowned with success: with the help of Ossetian, he managed to find out the meaning of a considerable portion of the non- Greek names in the inscriptions. The phonemic form of the names thus inter­preted by Miller shows, in many cases, a phonemic development parallel with that of Ossetian. These correspondences may be summed up as follows: 1. The initial p- phoneme of the Old Iranian languages has a correspon­ding / both in the names figuring in the inscriptions and in Ossetian: e. g. <t>íöac; = Ossetian fidä ’Vater’ ~ Avestan pitä; (boúpTots = Ossetian fart ’Sohn’ '—' Avestan púdra-, etc. 2. The Old Iranian initial fri- group of phonemes developed into U-: Aeipavo«; = Ossetian limän ’Freund’ ~ Avestan *friyamanali-. 3. Old Iranian initial v- has disappeared before i: ’Ivoúíafo^ — Old Ossetian *insadz-ag, cp. Western Ossetian insäi, Eastern Ossetian ssäj ’zwanzig’ ~ Avestan visaiti. 4. Old Iranian initial h- has disappeared before a: ‘Aßb- (in the following word: ’Apödßbu < *’Aßb-dp5a) = Ossetian avd ’sieben’ ~ Avestan hapta-. 1 Deutsche Altertumskunde, III. 101 —125. 2 His chief works: OceTiiHCKiie ano/tbi, I —III. MocKBa 1881 — 7; JpiropcKim CKa3aH>ifl, MocKBa 1902; Die Sprache der Osseten, Strassburg 1903: Ossetica, MocKBa 1904; the Ossetian dictionary published postumously by Freimann: OceTHHCKO-pyccKO­­HeMeuKim c.nOBapb, I —III. JleHUHrpag 1927 — 34. 3 Inscriptiones antiquae orae septentrionalis Ponti Euxini graecae et latinae, I, II, IV, 1885-1901.

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