The paper is the first attempt at reconstructing the word-family of scogs “among others” and detecting its manifold uses in OLT texts. The morpheme is traced back to a v4-stem of the verb √sʦog (CT v1 gsog), lit. “to cause to assemble”, itself derived from the verb root √ʦog by means of the causative prefix s-. After discussing its probable cognates and demonstrating historical links between them, I examine the ten constructions attested in the OLT corpus which contain the morpheme: finite clause, adverbial clause with past passive participle (I & II), post-head relative clause, R-dislocation, relative clause extraposition, pre-head relative clause, off-subject nominalisation, and idiomatic phrase (I & II). The paper sketches the lexicalisation path taken by the morpheme from a finite verb to an idiomatic phrase.

The paper presents the first complete reconstruction of the Old Tibetan (OT) verb morphology and semantics. Old Tibetan had a productive verb inflection with meaningful inflectional affixes b-, g-, ɣ-, d-, -d, and -s. The distribution of the prefixes was asymmetric and closely related to transitivity of a verb. Verbs of highest transitivity formed four distinct stems, whereas intransitive verbs inflected for one or two stems only. Grammatical voice is the only category that can explain the disproportion in the markings of transitive and intransitive verbs. Because the basic opposition was that between active and passive voice, intransitive verbs could only form active forms, whereas both active and passive forms were available for the majority of transitive verbs. In addition, both groups of verbs inflected for aspect, distinguishing between perfective and imperfective aspect. The OT inflectional system seems to have been a local innovation, only marginally related to verb morphology of other Tibeto-Burman languages.

The main objective of this paper is to propose the first tentative periodisation of the Old Tibetan (OT) language based on a group of related sound changes. As it occurs, at the time of the script invention in the 630s, Early Old Tibetan (EOT) must have had four onset clusters /s/+liquid: zr-, sr-, zl-, and sl-. However, in Old Tibetan as well as in Classical Tibetan (CT) we only find sr-, zl-, and sl-, whereas neither of them is attested in modern spoken varieties of Tibetan. In order to find out what has happened to the EOT zr-, I have traced reflexes of CT sr-, zl-, and sl- in modern dialects. Since changes that have occurred with respect to zl- and sl- parallel each other, I postulate that the same analogy can be applied to sr- to determine in what direction the EOT onset zr- might have evolved. Having reconstructed the development of the onsets in the most conservative dialects of Western Archaic Tibetan (WAT) and Amdo Tibetan (AT), I juxtapose these findings with historical facts that can help us to explain modern distribution of Tibetan dialects. Historical events recorded in OT documents combined with our knowledge of other early sound changes in Old Tibetan constitute a time frame for dating the reconstructed changes and thereby allow us to establish the first tentative linguistic periodisation of Old Tibetan.