Johnny Cheung, Ph.D. (2000) in Comparative Linguistics, Leiden University, is research assistant at SOAS, London, and research fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge. He has published extensively on Iranian linguistics, notably Studies in the Historical Development of the Ossetic Vocalism (2002).

The present work gives a critical survey of all the verbs that may have existed in Proto-Iranian as deduced from the attested Iranian descendants and their archaic sister language, Sanskrit. This is accompanied by an analysis of the morphology and assessment of the provenance.

The Iranian group within the Indo-European language family consists of languages that were and are still spoken in Western and Central Asia, among which Persian, Balochi, Kurdish, Pashto, Shughni and Ossetic are the best known today, and Avestan, Old and Middle Persian, Parthian, Bactrian, Khotanese, Sogdian and Choresmian in the past. This work aims to bridge the gap in knowledge that exists between Indo-Europeanists and scholars of Iranian languages with regard to each other's fields.