Historical Development of the agent suffix -tar- in Old Iranian

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Authors

1 Department of Ancient Iranian Culture and Languages, Faculty of Literature and Human Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

2 Department of Ancient Culture and Languages, Faculty of Literature and Human Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

One of the uses of the suffix -tar- in Indo-Iranian is to form an agent noun. The use of -tar- as the agent suffix has an Indo-European background. In the Indo-European period, the agent noun with this suffix has two forms, accented and unaccented, which can be traced in Vedic Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. In addition to the distinction in the position of the accent, these two forms of the agent noun differ in terms of meaning and syntax. The purpose of this article is to determine whether such a differentiation exists between the two forms of the agent noun in Old Iranian, and to identify their distinctive features. In other words, our work seeks to assess if the rules of syntax and morphophonology of the agent nouns in Vedic apply to Old Iranian. Any conclusion in this article is based on a comprehensive analysis of all available evidence in Old Iranian.

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