Armenian karmir “red” has often been considered as deriving from East Iranian, thus speaking in favour of relations between Armenian and Sogdian, a Middle Iranian language spoken at considerable distance from Armenia. For the origin of Hebrew karmīl, on the other hand, a Middle Persian “karmīr” has been suggested. In either case, the etymology would be Proto-Indo-European *ku̯ṛ́mi- “worm” (be it directly or as a borrowing from Sanskrit kṛ́mi-) from which the colour term would be derived in a way parallel to French vermeil “scarlet” from ver “worm”, thus a term referring to a red dye obtained from scale insects (cochineals). I argue that karmīr is not a Middle Persian word for “red”, that Sogdian is unlikely to be the source of the Armenian and Hebrew words, and that an Indian origin is not probable either because of the specific features of the Indian scale insect dye. Conversely, Armenian scarlet was widely known and appreciated already in antiquity, so that, for historical as well as linguistic reasons, the origin of the word is likely to be an Iranian language within the region where Armenian was spoken.

In this paper, I argue that the Semitic kinship terms *ʔab-‘father’, *ʔaḫ- ‘brother’, and *ḥam- ‘father-in-law’ originally ended in a w, which left traces in several of their forms. In the singular, the w contracted with the case vowels leaving a distinctive pattern of short and long vowels in the unbound, bound, and suffixal forms. In the plural, the w was retained in several languages due to the insertion of an a-vowel between the final two root consonants, a common Afro-Asiatic pluralization strategy: *ʔabw- > *ʔabaw. I further suggest that the West Semitic plural morpheme -aw was derived by analogy with the plurals *ʔabaw and *ʔaḫaw, and is not, as commonly suggested, an inherited Semitic or Afro-Asiatic plural marker.

This paper is a first attempt at understanding the impact of Islam on families in eighth-century rural Ṭukhāristan (modern-day northern Afghanistan), at the periphery of the late Umayyad and early ʿAbbāsid caliphate. Tukhāristan lay in the ancient region of Bactria, which became the land and city of Balkh after the Islamic conquests of the early seven hundreds ad. My analysis is based on a fascinating corpus of legal documents and letters, written in Bactrian and Arabic in the fourth to eighth centuries ad, which were discovered, edited and translated relatively recently. Scholars of Central Asia have tended to discuss the region's early Islamic history within a politico-military framework based on chronicles and prosopographies written in Arabic and/or adapted into Persian centuries after the Muslim conquests. Such narrative sources describe an ideal state defined by genres of Islamic historiography, and come with the usual menu of distortions, simplifications and exoticisms. The documents under review, on the other hand, were written to serve immediate and practical uses; the evidence they offer is devoid of rhetoric, recording aspects of life and social groupings to which we would otherwise have no access. This paper argues that during the transition to Islamic rule (c. ad 700–771), Bactrian and Islamic administrative systems co-existed, and significantly affected family life and marriage traditions. Specifically, it is suggested that the early ʿAbbāsid tax system eclipsed the age-old practice of fraternal polyandry here: more by default than by design.

The Persian term khargāh is first attested at the beginning of the fourth/tenth century. It has often been translated as “hut” or “pavilion”, but a comprehensive overview of the historical, geographical and poetic sources points to a more precise definition. Three main conclusions can be established. First, from the beginning the term exclusively referred to the trellis tent (commonly known as yurt) first identified in a Turkic milieu in Inner Asia. Second, khargāh entered the Arabic and Persian languages through the Sāmānid court and quickly replaced the Arabic expression al-qubba al-turkiyya which was previously used to refer to this kind of tent. Third, the presence of the trellis tent in Muslim courts predates the arrival of the nomadic Saljuqs in the fifth/eleventh century. The trellis tent, associated with the cloth enclosure (or sarāparda), was already a status symbol under the Sāmānids and Būyids in the fourth/tenth century. Thus this study, which lies at the crossroads of lexicography and the history of technology, provides new elements towards a better understanding of Central Asian cultural influence on the wider ‘Abbāsid world.

This paper examines the social currency of copper-plate charters on the basis of Persian copper-plates from the Deccan. Indic religious systems have a long tradition of conferring land grants using this medium, partially rooted in beliefs of metaphysical qualities attributed to metals. The objects from this region are highly unusual because there are no other recorded instances of a sultan issuing or authorizing land grants on copper-plates. The Persian-language copper-plates appear from the sixteenth century onwards, and seem to be later copies of (or extracts from) paper-based charters issued by Bahmani sultans and other kingdoms in the Deccan. Issues of authenticity and forgeries, fakes and copies are also raised in this paper. This study examines objects that combine material culture and textual content. While the textual content of these objects has always been privileged as being a source of history, the medium – which itself has a history of reception – has not been given its own historical narrative. The paper provides new perspectives on what we might call the “social life” of different documentary formats in medieval and early modern India, in particular the copper-plate grant.

This paper investigates the uses of the deictic motion verbs in Pashto. First, the paper focuses on the Pashto verbs COME and GO. The Pashto COME verb is unique in that it requires a directional person marker. These person markers are used in specific situations, which are outlined in this paper. Furthermore, the verbal person marker and the dative argument of the motion verb can differ in person. Such person “mismatches” are explained in terms of ascendance on the Person Hierarchy and of a semantic understanding of person. Second, this paper shows that the phenomenon of directional person markers extends to all Pashto motion verbs. Finally, the paper briefly discusses how Pashto COME and GO do not align with cross-linguistic analyses of COME and GO verbs in other languages. This misalignment is credited to the unique three-way deictic split of COME.

Drawing on the archival study of over 1,600 copies of the Tibetan Aparimitāyur-nāma mahāyāna-sūtra (Tib.: Tshe dpag du myed pa'i mdo) produced in Dunhuang from the 820s to the 840s and now kept in the British Library, this article sheds light on the orthographic norms of Middle Old Tibetan writing. Based on editors' corrections, and on a corpus of nearly 200 transcribed explicits, the article compares the orthographic norms of this group of sutras with those of other dated Old Tibetan manuscripts and inscriptions. It proposes that among the most important markers for dating Old Tibetan writing are the increased use in the tenth century of the ’i(s) form of the genitive and ergative particles as a separate syllable, and the relative absence of the tu form of the terminative particle in Middle Old Tibetan writing. Additionally, the study offers suggestions concerning the development of the various forms of Tibetan case particles.