Ricerc@Sapienza

A revision of MacKenzie's transcription of the Pahlavi script is suggested as regards the final sequences ‹-lg› and ‹-lk?›. While MacKenzie reads the two spellings in many different ways, without a clear distributional rule, the suggestion is to read them in two well-defined ways (respectively as [rg] and [rag/lag]), depending on the synchronic morphology, etymology and the outcomes in New Persian.

The present article aims to reconsider in detail the original formulation of Grassmann’s law (GL), proposed by Grassmann (1863), since the main handbooks of Indo-European linguistics often repeat an extremely concise and sometimes incomplete formulation of the phenomenon without going into the details of Grassmann’s original reasoning, from which the definition of the phonetic “law” took its shape.