Historical Development of Comparative and Superlative Adjectives in Old Iranian and West Middle Iranian Languages and New Persian Authors

Adjective in its natural or «positive» state may be made comparative or superlative by the addition of suffixes. In this article the development of these suffixes from Indo-European to New Persian is discussed in five sections. The first section explains these suffixes in Indo-European. In the second section due to many similarities between the two languages of Avetan and Sanskrit، these suffixes have been presented together. This section is based upon the work of Wackernagel who has analyzed these suffixes in Sanskrit; however studying the function of these suffixes in the ancient Iranian languages and comparing them to Sanskrit following Wackernagel''s method is novel to this article. The third section addresses the function of these suffixes in Old Persian.