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The Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies
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Iranian Languages
OSSETIC LANGUAGE
An Eastern-Iranian language spoken in the northern Caucasus by the Ossetes. There are two major dialects: (1) eastern, called Iron, and (2) western, called Digor. Digor is the more archaic, Iron words being often a syllable shorter than their Digor counterparts—e.g., Digor madä, Iron mad “mother.”
Iron is spoken by the majority of Ossetic speakers and is the basis of the literary language. Ossetic is the modern descendant of the language of the ancient Alani, a Sarmatian people, and the medieval As. It preserves many archaic features of Old Iranian, such as eight cases and verbal prefixes.
The phonology of the language has been greatly influenced by the non-Indo-European languages of the Caucasus, and the present vocabulary has many loanwords from Russian. There are many folk epics in Ossetic; the most famous are the tales about hero warriors, the Narts.
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"History is the Light on the Path to Future" |
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Encyclopaedia Iranica
The British Institute of Persian Studies "Persepolis Reconstructed"
The British Museum
The Cyrus Legacy
The Royal Asiatic Society
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