In the fifth book of the Iliad is a tangle of textual and linguistic problems. The poet, after telling how Diomedes stabbed Aphrodite's arm near the hand, finishes (if we disregard for a moment lines 340–2, which will turn out to be an interpolation) his description of the encounter (339):

The name Vištāspa-, which the Greeks represented by Hystaspes, belongs to a number of personages in Iranian history: the East Iranian ruler who was Zoroaster's first royal convert, the father of Darius the Great, and several minor princely descendents of Darius. That Zoroaster's patron was identical with Darius's father is most unlikely, though it has been and is still maintained by some scholars; but that problem lies outside the field of the present discussion. Only so far does it at the moment interest me, that the name Vištāspa appears to have gained prestige from the fact that it was the name of Zoroaster's patron, and therefore enjoyed a vogue in the line of Achaemenian princes.

[Just as homonyms may conflict, so historically independent words through a series of gradual shifts in meaning tend to develop irreconcilable senses; obsolescence is thus closely connected with semantic change. Illustrations from the New English Dictionary and the Linguistic Atlas of New England.]

[A reconsideration of the available orthographic and orthoepistic evidence and a new explanation of how k and g disappeared from the initial groups kn and gn.]

[The morphemes na and ta, best known in the so-called ‘genitive’ construction, have well-defined morpheme alternants in Hausa. Recognition of these simplifies the description of both morphologic and syntactic relations.]