The Early New Persian directional prepositions bāz ‘back to’ and bā ‘towards’

The article deals with two prepositions endowed with a directional value, bāz and bā, attested in Early New Persian texts of both literary and non-literary character. After a brief review of the main studies concerning the matter, Gilbert Lazard’s position (1963) is discussed, according to whom bāz and bā represent only two forms of the same preposition bā(z), meaning ‘back, back to, re ’. Starting from a review of the examples given by Lazard, and from an analysis of texts published in more recent times, the article aims at demonstrating that the partially homonymous prepositions bāz and bā (the latter with a variant bāz in literary Early New Persian that makes it a partial homonymous of the former) are two different morphemes, having two distinct etymologies and endowed with two opposite directional meanings: ‘back to’, and ‘to(wards)’ respectively; and that the the directional bā ‘to(wards)’is etymologically and semantically connected with the comitative preposition bā ‘with’. The article also puts forward a hypothesis to explain the development of the preposition bāz ‒ only attested in Early New Persian texts ‒ from the adverb and preverb abāz ‘back, again’ of Middle Persian; and touches on the destiny of the directional prepositions bāz and bā, together with another early directional preposition: bē ‘to, towards’, attested in Early Judaeo-Persian texts and in the so-called Qurʾān-i Quds