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The Indo-Iranian Construction mana (mama) krtam

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

George Cardona
George Cardona*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Abstract

The Old Persian construction type tya manā krtam ‘what I have done’, in which a genitive form of a nominal (manā), used to denote an agent, occurs construed with a participial form (krtam), has exact counterparts in Avestan and in Indic. The Old Persian construction is generally considered a possessive construction. This view is shown to be unacceptable; the Old Persian data require that manā krtam be classed as a passive construction, which accords with the facts of Avestan and Indic. It is also shown that the construction Ir. mana krtam, Ind. mama krtam arose through contact between nominal and verbal syntactic patterns as a variant of an older Indo-Iranian construction in which agent was denoted by an instrumental nominal form. The developments discussed have close parallels in Latin.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , March 1970, pp. 1 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © 1970 by Linguistic Society of America

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