Ricerc@Sapienza

Impersonal verbs and constructions attested in ancient Indo-European languages show a marked uniformity at both semantic and structural levels, even though the etymons of the forms involved are often different. This allows us to surmise that these constructions were inherited from Proto-Indo-European. In this scenario both Ancient Greek and ancient Indo-Iranian languages differ from other varieties of the Indo-European family since they have relatively few impersonal verbs and constructions. This paper focuses on a specific type of impersonal expression in Old Persian, the so-called mām kāma construction, which is significantly similar to an impersonal expression in Homeric Greek. This correspondence, together with data resulting from the analysis of the Babylonian and, in particular, of the Elamite versions to which this paper is largely devoted, allows us to hypothesize that the mām kāma construction is inherited from Proto-Indo-European, and that some Elamite ‘translations’ of mām kāma are possibly syntactic calques.