Categorial Traces of Inalienable Possession in Pahlavī Aramaic Masks

This paper deals with a specific Aramaic heterographic stock in Middle Persian and Parthian scripts (both inscriptional and bookish), namely masks concerning kinship terms and lexemes for the body parts. After a thorough state-of-the-art report on the logographic issue in the Middle Persian scripts, a new hypothesis is put forward: the <-H> ending logograms are Aramaic "frozen" names with a mandatory 3rd sing. pron. suffix, which marked the inalienable property of the possessa. Several typological parallels are quoted to strenghten this diachronic explanation which, in turn, is grounded on a specifically "pragmatic" interpretation of the rise of the logogaphic stock in Middle Iranian.