Ricerc@Sapienza

The papers analyses the indirect sources attesting the sonorisation of the Prot-Iranian *-k- in New Persian.

In the present paper it is argued that the Middle Persian voicing of OIr. *‑k‑ in post-vocalic position occurred only after the voicing of the other two Old Iranian voiceless stops. This claim is suggested by a closer inspection of the treatment of the outcomes of OIr. *‑k‑ in Middle Persian of the Pahlavi Books, in Manichaean Middle Persian, in New Persian, and in the parallel tradition represented by the Greek versions of the Sasanian multilingual inscriptions.

This paper aims to demonstrate the caveats called for in the reconstruction of the so-called quantity collapse from Late Latin to Pre-Romance. The Uniformitarian Principle does not necessarily require the inspection and explanation of “bad data”. The past, in other words, is not always aligned with our predictive synchronic paradigms. As a matter of fact, a rather significant number of passages by the ancient grammarians shed light on the mechanisms which led to the neutralization of prosodic feature [±long] in spoken Latin stressed syllables.