From ancient times, 'Iranianate' cultures and the Persian language had a significant role beyond the borders of Iran: in the lands of the Near & Middle East, Central Asia as far as China and India. The book collects novel contributions within five chapters focussed on the Islamic periods. Creating a unique multi-disciplinary panorama, 39 scholars from twelve countries deal with individual themes from history and historiography, the history of literature and language, cultural and religious history, art history and the history of culinary culture.

Ever since Ossetic was extensively researched by eminent Iranists like Abaev, Bailey, Gershevitch and Benveniste, the language has earned a prominent place in (Indo-)Iranian and Indo-European Linguistics. Dealing with phonology together with etymological and morphological considerations, this study is the latest comprehensive treatment of the Ossetic language, since E. Benveniste, Études sur la langue ossète, in 1959.

In this work, the Authors provide a detailed analysis of the Pashto Simple “Naked” Verbs, i.e. all not suffixed simple verbs, and the linguistic dynamics at work still nowadays. The classification of used Simple “Naked” Verbs in three main groups (those belonging to the “norm”; those whose position is changing and can be located in a “zone frontière”; those showing a complexification linked to the aspect) will be useful and helpful for Pashto students and scholars, for researchers in the field of Iranian philology and for linguists.

The book investigates the deep linguistic contact between Iranians and Arameans from the formation of the Achaemenid empire onwards, and focuses especially on the linguistic relationship between Middle Persian and Classical Syriac during the Sasanian empire, a subject on which a modern systematic study was still missing. The first part of the book is a detailed study of the historical and linguistic conditions which favoured the entry of a great number of Iranian words into Syriac and the linguistic consequences of such borrowings. The second part contains, in dictionary form, hundreds of entries in which each single Iranian loanword is considered, together with its etymon, alternative forms, and derivatives. Each entry also includes a list of occurrences and the relevant bibliography. A complete index of words closes the volume. The study of the prolonged contact between such prestigious languages as Syriac and Middle Persian, that are only attested in written records, enriches our knowledge of the typologies of language interference and bilingualism in ancient society. More specifically, it allows to recover a considerable amount of otherwise unattested Middle Persian vocabulary and provides new insights into the linguistic systems of both Syriac and Middle Persian.

Twenty-seven articles by prominent Indo-Europeanists, Indologists and Iranists have been selected to commemorate the most innovative and consequent exeget of Avesta (the missal of the pre-islamic Paniranian religion, Mazdaeism or Parsism) of our times, Jean Kellens and to inscenery his intellectual pathway and thereby also the present debates around the oldest language and religious history of the common ancestors of Indians and Iranians. The themes Jean Kellens has put into fresh light, intertextuality, stilistics, ideology, textual history and reuse, are especially represented, but always under the light of the mother discipline: grammar.

Contacts between Tocharian A and B and Khotanese and Tumshuqese, four languages once spoken in today’s Xīnjiāng Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwest China, lack a comprehensive treatment and are still a controversial topic. This work contains the first systematic investigation of the matter from a linguistic point of view. Through a detailed analysis of the lexical material, the author is able to argue that the influence of Khotanese and Tumshuqese on Tocharian was much more extensive than previously thought and it spanned over almost two millennia, from the early Iron Age until the extinction of the four languages at the end of the first millennium CE. 1. Preis der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft für die beste Dissertation (2022); Award of Iranian Studies of the Societas Iranologica Europaea (2023)

In diesem Buch, der ersten methodisch reflektierten Bearbeitung eines ganzen Wortfeldes im Indoiranischen, werden Lexeme für das Konzept ,Lohn‘ von solchen für ,Preis‘ und ,Gabe‘ abgegrenzt unter Anwendung einer typischen Szene als Substitutionsrahmen. Die besonderen Merkmale semantisch ähnlicher Wörter werden ermittelt und mit ihrer etymologischen Bedeutung verglichen.

In this work, the Authors provide an analysis of the entire verbal system of Pashto, the language of some 50 million speakers in Afghanistan, Pakistan and diasporas. As an Iranian language, Pashto verbs share some main behaviours with the other sister languages, as Persian and Kurdish, but with some peculiarities. This study will permit to fully understand Pashto verbal system from the syntactic and morphologic points of view, at the same time offering complete dialectological, typological and lexicographical information, as well as ample phraseologies.