On the Historical Phonology of Ossetic: The Origin of the Oblique Case Suffix‪.‬

1. THE PROBLEM: PROTO-OSSETIC OBLIQUE *-I Ossetic is spoken by approximately half a million inhabitants of the autonomous Republic of North Ossetia-Alania in the Russian Federation and the former autonomous region of South Ossetia in Georgia, as well as adjoining regions of the central Caucasus and emigrant communities in cities such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Tbilisi. (1) The language belongs to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European family and is the sole surviving descendant of the Northeast Iranian dialects of the ancient Scythians and Sarmatians and medieval Alans, who dominated the Eurasian steppe between the Danube delta and Central Asia from the first millennium B.C. until the early Middle Ages. Despite having undergone numerous idiosyncratic developments--and influence from neighboring Caucasian and Turkic languages--Ossetic preserves many startling archaisms in its phonology and morphology, due in part to its isolation from the rest of the Iranian-speaking world for some thousand years.