Tous les chemins mènent à Paris

This volume honouring Dr Agnes Korn's continuing support for young researchers is a collection of nine papers contributed by authors whose careers and lives have been touched by Dr Korn's academic guidance and personal mentoring during her time in Paris as a chargée de recherches at CNRS. The topics covered in the chapters highlight Dr Korn's wide array of research interests, encompassing cultures and languages - both classical and modern, written and oral, well-known and underdescribed - of the Caucasus-Iran-Central Asia area and its immediate vicinity.

The book consists of a preface and an introduction, as well as chapters presenting novel research, influenced directly or indirectly by Dr Korn's deep academic involvement. The chapters, each reviewed by one referee under a double-blind peer review process, deal with issues of etymology, historical language contact, morphology and syntax, typological modelling, and folk practices.

Bernard (pp. 15-24) explores the etymology of Mazandaran, the name of a province situated in Northern Iran. Chamot-Rooke (pp. 25-36) analyses the use and origin of smam, a previously unacknowledged Tocharian A lexical item. Gérardin (pp. 37-71) introduces a new typological approach to classifying and describing the valency of Georgian verbs. Jügel (pp. 73-91) suggests that linguistic areas with a dominant religious affiliation may be considered a factor influencing the historical dialectology of Persian. Kontovas (pp. 93-106) presents an overview of the reflexes of Proto-Iranian *w- in modern and classical Iranian languages with the intention of determining if language contact has affected their distribution. Mascagni (pp. 107-121) provides a comprehensive description of a traditional Baloch string instrument, the sorud, and reflects on the process of repairing and tuning this instrument, which he has documented. Pastor (pp. 123-150) examines processes of degrammaticalization of the pronominal clitic =(e)s in colloquial Persian