Modern Iron orthography as a “window” to the past and future of the Ossetic language

The research object is the orthography of the modern Ossetic (Iron) language. The aim of the study is to eliminate the gaps in the current rules of Ossetic orthography by identifying the patterns of spelling of certain groups of words, to which none of the three orthographic principles can be applied (neither phonetic, nor morphological, nor traditionally historical). The work is novel in that it is the first in Ossetic studies to explain the peculiarities of spelling certain groups of words of the Iron dialect through the phenomena of the Digor dialect. The results of the research showed the following: the status of the Digor dialect as a “boundary” between the Old Iranian and the modern Iron stages of the Ossetic language is confirmed at the level of the orthography of the Iron literary language. The spelling of the groups of Iron words considered is based on the etymological (or morphological) principle, which requires uniform spelling of specific morphemes, however, related morphemes for lexicalized words are found not in the Iron dialect of the Ossetic language itself, but in the more archaic Digor dialect. It was also shown that the morphological principle of Iron orthography should be understood as the uniform spelling of morphemes, reflecting, among other things, their historical changes.