Late Khotanese has the verbs ¹bijs‑ ‘to pour’ < Iranian *u̯ai̯ǰ‑ ‘to shake, swing’ and ²bījs‑ ‘to fit in’ (intransitive) < Iranian *u̯i̯ač‑ ‘to contain’. The article reinterprets three passages in two Buddhist works and shows that the second verb also occurs in Old Khotanese and was originally spelled ²bijs‑.
All Khotanese verbs in -Vṣ- with attested third singular present indicative have been
regarded so far as type B verbs, that is, synchronically, verbs with no intervening
vowel between the present stem and the third singular endings -itä active < Iranian
*-a-ti and -te middle < Iranian *-a-tai̯ (variously assimilated to the stem finals,
e.g. -ʾtä, -ṣ-ḍe). Besides, all of them have been considered to be middle verbs with
third singular present indicative -ṣḍe apart from the active verbs *käṣ- ‘to think; to
The Berlin Khotanese fragment ‘bi 43’ seems to belong to an unidentified Buddhist text with
spells against various evils. It contains the first attestation of the verb durṣḍä ‘it bites’,
which makes it possible to bring together and assign to a verb *druv’- , pp. durṣṭa- ‘to bite,
sting’ several Khotanese words that occurr in contexts of snakes and other biting or stinging
animals and have been variously interpreted and explained so far: Late Khotanese drvīdä
‘they bite’, dū̆ (r)ṣṭa- ‘bitten, stung’, Old Khotanese druvā ‘biting’, and drutāta ‘id.’.
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