Conference Presentations by Svenja Bonmann
Presentation at the International Scientific Work Seminar of the Academy of Sciences of Tajikista... more Presentation at the International Scientific Work Seminar of the Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan on the topic "Discovery of the Almosi Inscriptions and Their Position among the Ancient Scripts of Central Asia", 1 March, 2023.
Papers by Svenja Bonmann
Presentation (October 5, 2023) at the International Scientific Symposium
“Takht-i Sangin as an E... more Presentation (October 5, 2023) at the International Scientific Symposium
“Takht-i Sangin as an Example of the Synthesis of the Civilizations Of East And West”
dedicated to the 2500th anniversary of the site of Takht-i Sangin, Dushanbe, October 4-6, 2023.
Transactions of the Philological Society, 2023
Several dozen inscriptions in an unknown writing system have been discovered in an area stretchin... more Several dozen inscriptions in an unknown writing system have been discovered in an area stretching geographically from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to southern Afghanistan. Most inscriptions can be dated to the period from the 2nd century BCE to the 3rd century CE, yet all attempts at decipherment have so far been unsuccessful. The recent discovery of previously unknown inscriptions near the Almosi gorge, Tajikistan, however, allows for a renewed attempt at decipherment. Drawing upon a catalogue of characters and a distributional analysis, we report two identical sequences in the newly found Almosi inscriptions and in the Da st-i N awur trilingual. Based on parallel texts in Bactrian, we suggest to read the name of the Kushan emperor Vema Takhtu in these sequences, accompanied by the title 'king of kings' and several epithets. This allows for the deduction of probable phonetic values of 15 different consonantal signs and four vocalic diacritics and the inference that the inscriptions record a previously unknown Middle Iranian language. ФИШУРДА Дар минтақае, ки аз Қазоқистону Ӯзбекистон ва Тоҷикистон то ҷануби Афғонистон тӯл мекашад, даҳҳо навиштаҷот бо як навъ хатти номаълум кашф карда шудаанд. Аксари ин катибаҳо мансуб ба асри II пеш аз милод то асри III мелодӣ мебошанд, аммо ҳама кӯшишҳои рамзкушоии он то ба ҳол бебарор буданд. Бо вуҷуди ин, кашфи катибаҳои нав бо хатти қаблан номаълум дар дараи Алмосии Тоҷикистон, имкон фароҳам овард, ки кӯшиши дубораи рамзкушоӣ анҷом дода шавад. Бо такя ба феҳристи аломатҳо ва таҳлили муқоисавӣ, мо аз ду пайдарпайии якхела дар катибаи тозакашфи Алмосӣ ва *The results of this article have first been presented at the digital conference "Discovery of the Almosi inscriptions and its significance in the system of ancient writings of Central Asia" (National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tajikistan) in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, on the 1st of March 2023. First, we thank Tim Williams who helped the German side of our team establish contact with Bobomullo Bobomulloev. After unsuccessful attempts to contact the Ecole franc ßaise d'Extrême-Orient, Agnes Korn and Philip Huyse helped us tremendously in finding out where the original photographs of Da st-i N awur are being held. We are indebted to the Coll ege de France and Claire Guttinger for sending us all available photographs and allowing us to use them in a publication, likewise to Ingo Strauch with regard to the Socotra inscription. We further thank the participants of the conference in Tajikistan for their feedback, questions and remarks. We especially thank Pavel Lurje, Lauren Morris, Joe Cribb and Ching Chao-jung for the discussions that followed this conference and for graciously sharing literature and photos that were not available to us before and Sviatoslav Kaverin for helping us access literature. Special thanks go to Simon Fries for comments that helped shape the text to its final form. We thank our colleagues and particularly Eugen Hill for supporting us with enthusiasm and questions, especially at the discussion that took place at the University of Cologne on the 12th of May 2023. Finally, we would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments and Lutz Marten for his great editorial support.
International Journal of Diachronic Linguistics and Linguistic Reconstruction 14: 119–189, 2017
This paper deals with two intertwined topics: firstly, it focuses on the wellknown asymmetry in t... more This paper deals with two intertwined topics: firstly, it focuses on the wellknown asymmetry in the PIE endings of the dative, ablative and instrumental plural. Here it seems reasonable to assume that the mendings of Balto-Slavic and Germanic directly reflect the original situation, whereas the b h-endings of Indo-Iranian, Greek, Armenian, Celtic and Italic emerged secondarily by a series of sound changes. Secondly, the paper takes a close look at the PIE pronominal declension. In spite of a-superficially regarded-lacking connection between these two issues, it is argued that the particular case-form, in which the b h-endings emerged, was neither the dative-ablative plural nor the instrumental plural, but rather the dative-ablative-instrumental dual of the demonstrative *to-. For this pronoun, we can reconstruct pre-PIE *to-du-ih 1 oum/*todu-ih 1 eum/*to-du-ih 1 um for the case-form in question, consisting of the pronominal stem, the word for 'two' and an ablauting case-ending. These variants developed via several intermediate stages to early PIE *toh 1 b h i̯ ōm/*toh 1 b h i̯ ēm/*toh 1 b h ih 1 m. Subsequently, paradigmatic structuring led to a diffusion of the reanalyzed pronominal endings *-b h i̯ ōm, *-b h i̯ ēm and *-b h ih 1 m to the nominal and adjectival declensions and to corresponding forms of the singular and plural, in which each IE branch went its own way. Finally, it is argued that the peculiarities of the pronominal plural can be explained in a similar way by the assumption of an old stem *to-is- .
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Conference Presentations by Svenja Bonmann
Papers by Svenja Bonmann
“Takht-i Sangin as an Example of the Synthesis of the Civilizations Of East And West”
dedicated to the 2500th anniversary of the site of Takht-i Sangin, Dushanbe, October 4-6, 2023.
“Takht-i Sangin as an Example of the Synthesis of the Civilizations Of East And West”
dedicated to the 2500th anniversary of the site of Takht-i Sangin, Dushanbe, October 4-6, 2023.