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by Georg Morgenstierne (Author)
Shughni is the most important member of a group of Eastern Iranian dialects spoken in the Pamirs, now fairly well known, largely thanks to the work of Soviet scholars. This group has retained a large number of ancient Iranian words, and the dialect variation of phonetical development enables us in many cases to reconstruct more archaic forms than the present ones.During many years, Georg Morgenstriene has assembled and analysed material from many scattered sources, including also words of Iranian "appearance", but of so far unknown etymology. The corpus of attested Old Iranian vocabulary being very restricted, and even that of Middle Iranian having numerous, large lacunae, the etymologies to be called from archaic, modern dialects will be of great value and interest to all students on Iranian linguistics.
