Old Persian mav‑ and the Evolution of the Inchoative Suffix in Iranian

In this article the so far unexplained Old Persian verbal form amūθa ‘he fled’ is interpreted as an imperfect built on an inchoative present stem from the Iranian root *mauH‑ ‘to move’. Starting from the observation that, in Old Persian, an outcome ‑θa‑ instead of ‑sa‑ for the Indo-Iranian suffix *-sća‑ is phonologically irregular in this position, a morphological explanation is proposed. It is argued that the stem mūθa‑ is a recent formation, not inherited from the Proto-Iranian stage. This finding is framed within a broader discussion on the historical development of the inchoative suffix in the Iranian languages, distinguishing between old inchoatives, i.e. formations inherited from a pre-historical stage (Indo-Iranian, sometimes even Proto-Indo-European) and recent inchoatives, i.e. new formations productively built in historical times.