 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2015 Allomorphic Variability in the Middle Persian Continuants of the Old Iranian Suffix *-ka- Claudia A. Ciancaglini La Sapienza, Rome Abstract This paper investigates the Middle Persian continuants of a very widespread derivative suffix, OIr. *-ka-, which is generally claimed to have had only one outcome in Middle Persian, namely -Vg, written ‹-k'›. As is known, this outcome gave raise to a number of different Middle Persian suffixes, for instance -ag, -āg, -īg etc., through the reanalysis of the preceding vowel as a part of the suffix. I wish to demonstrate that already in Middle Persian, and not just in New Persian, OIr. *-ka- had many other minority outcomes that have never been recognised in the previous studies. I also wish to underline that these allotropes, not all of which are perceived, and function, as true suffixes in Middle Persian synchronically, are sometimes explicitly marked in the Pahlavi script, notwith- standing its well-known ambiguous and archaizing nature. Finally, I suggest that the presence al- ready in Middle Persian of different outcomes of OIr. *-ka- can partly depend on early borrowing processes among Middle Iranian dialects, and partly reflect different diachronic stages of the leni- tion process undergone by the OIr. voiceless velar plosive in internal and final postvocalic position. Keywords Middle Persian, Morphology, Phonology, Suffixation 1. INTRODUCTION * The Old Iranian (henceforth: OIr.) suffix *-ka- is continued by many Middle Per- sian (henceforth: MP) suffixes, generally assuming the form -(V)g or -(V)k, for example MP -ag, -āg, -ak, -īg, -īk, -ūg etc. The initial vowel of the suffix in the majority of cases derives from the wrong segmentation of the stem vowel his- torically preceding the suffix *-ka-, and only very rarely from genuine vocalic “primary” suffixes such as *-aka- and the like. The quantity of the long vowels in the MP suffixes results either from sandhi phenomena that lengthened an older * I am happy and honoured to contribute to this volume celebrating the 60th anniversary of Prof. Dr. Garnik Asatrian, an excellent and renowned scholar in the field of Iranian studies. I offer him this paper, together with my best wishes, as a little token of my esteem and gratitude.