The Ossetic transitive preterite

Abstract

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 other Iranian language. It is argued that only a periphrasis with Old Iranian *dā- ‘put’ can adequately account for the formal peculiarities of the Ossetic transitive preterite, namely its geminate dental and person-number endings. Despite its formal resemblance to the periphrasis reconstructed for the Germanic weak preterite, this construction probably did not arise via contact between the Sarmatian tribes and Germanic peoples in the first centuries CE.