Old Persian Simplifications towards Middle Persian

In the course of its development, Old Persian experienced a fast, thorough arestructuring during the Achaemenid period. This development was so great that itmarked the beginning of the Middle era in Western Iranian languages. Similar to someother middle IE languages like English, Western Iranian languages are analytic languageswhich have lost a great part of their complexity in their transition from the Old typeto the Middle one. The present article tries to provide some examples regarding theprocesses of regularization, loss of redundancy, and growth in transparency, as suggestedin sociolinguistic typology (Trudgill 2010). As such, the development of Old Persianinto Middle Persian is shown to be parallel to major developments in the ancient Iraniansociety after the rise of Achaemenids.