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THE STILL USEFUL COLLECTION of historical linguistic material to be found in Paul Horn, Grundriss der neupersischen Etymologie (Strassburg, 1893-photo-reprint 1966) contains numerous references to Judeo-Persian forms as culled from the very few J-P texts available at the end of the 19th century. These were primarily the J-P versions of the prophetic books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel (through Ez 9.4 only) published by Paul de Lagarde in his Persische Studien, pp. 3-140 (in the right part of the volume) [Gottingen, 1884]. These texts were based on manuscripts in the Bibliotheque Nationale. The other major source for Horn-also from a manuscript in Paris (Bibl. Nat. 128)-was II. Zotenberg, "Geschichte Daniels: Ein Apokryph," Archiv fur wissensch. Erforschung des Alten Testaments 1.385-427 (1869). Horn's practice in citing J-P forms wherever possible was commendable, and was worthy of emulation in later decades. However, aside from the scattered efforts of a very few scholars at the turn of the century-most notably Wilhelm Bacher-the large numbers of J-P manuscripts and books available in many collections have remained unstudied and unknown. This note seeks to demonstrate once again what an important source for the history of the Persian language the J-P texts represent, by focussing on a single set of forms-the short copulas ham first person singular, him first person plusal, hid second person plural, and hand third person plural. The third person singular hast that is current in Islamic Persian is the sole survivor of what was clearly a full paradigm in an earlier stage of the language. (No examples of the second person singular hi (hy) were found; and it was not considered necessary to cite any of the frequently occurring hast forms from J-P.) In section 107 (page 25) of his etymological dictionary, Horn discusses these forms and cites the J-P shapes here transliterated as hm, hym, hyd, hnd (they appear in Hebrew type-but with two misprints: samex for mem in the first two forms). We now give a tabulation of the occurrence of these copulas from three texts

WAS THE OP SYLLABARY an ad hoc invention under the Achaemenids or is it the much eroded survivor of an older and more complete writing system? * This problem has been repeatedly discussed chiefly by reference to the evidence from the Greek sources, from Aramaeo-Pehlevi scribal practice, and from the more direct-though not completely clear-evidence in paragraph 70 of the Bisitun inscription.' The argument offered in this paper is submitted in order to show that internal linguistic evidence available from the OP language itself has not been completely exhausted. An examination of the relevant handbooks re