Ebook: The Avestan language and its problems

Publisher: Oxford University Press
Date: 2002
Pages: 22Demo Version
DURING THE LAST TWO DECADES of the twentieth century, Avestan studies have witnessed an astonishing explosion of scholarly interest, which has been manifested in a large number of monographs concerning both the Old Avestan language, as represented in Zoroaster’s Gāthās and the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti and Young Avestan texts such as the Zamyād Yašt or the Ērbadastān, each of which has been edited twice within the past ten years. Comparing the competing editions now available, we may note that a high level of agreement has been achieved both in the analysis of individual Avestan word-forms and in the interpretation of the texts which depends on this analysis.
Nevertheless every scholar who deals with the language of Zoroaster will admit that the Avestan tradition still conceals many a riddle to be solved by later generations of investigators. In principle, this may be due to three well-known reasons:
First we have to take into account the fact that the Avestan corpus is rather small: less than 1,700,000 characters if arranged in a plain text format. If we compare this with the Vedic tradition, which is what comes nearest to it with respect both to its contents and to the circumstances of its transmission, we may observe that the size of the complete Avestan corpus is less than that of the Rιgveda Saṃhitā alone, although the latter represents only one tenth of the whole Veda.