Etymology of the Persian Shomā?

Answer 1

Modern Persian šomā (2nd person plural OR 2nd person singular formal pronoun) derives from Middle Persian ašmā (2nd person plural pronoun). If I'm not mistaken, the 2nd person plural personal pronoun is not attested in the corpus of Old Persian texts, so we don't have evidence of a direct ancestor. But perhaps we can point to Avestan, another Old Iranian language, a great-uncle of Modern Persian, which has a 2nd person plural in the instrumental case xšmā as a possible relative. You can draw your own conclusions based on reconstructions of 2nd person plural PIE pronouns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language#Pronoun