Raham Asha, Avesta: A Grammatical Précis, Dushanbe, Academy of Sciences, Tehran, Sade, 2019, ISBN 978-600-8968-27-6.
Acknowledgments
The present book was compiled during my stay in Dushanbe last year. It grew out of the needs of class-room work, first and foremost with students of old languages in the Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan, Dushanbe. It partly meets our demand for further teaching tools to assist the student of Avesta; it is also compiled with the needs of the student of Linguistics in mind, and for this reason etymological notes are offered.
Thanks are due to many people who have helped with the work, especially to Farhod Rahimi (president of Tajikistan’s Academy of Sciences) who initiated the project, Parvona Jamshed (professor of Linguistics and Cultural History, Dushanbe) who, by his presence in class, facilitated my work, and Massoud Mirshahi (researcher, Sorbonne University Paris Cité -Paris 7) who repeatedly smoothed its path. I am also grateful for help from Bozorgmehr Loghman and Mazda Tajbakhsh.
frazaft ped drūd ud šādīh
rōz ī rašn māh ī šahrēver sāl ēk hazār ud sisad ud aštād ud ašt yazdegirdīg (A.D. 2019, January 1), ped rōstāg ī arrou.
Raham Asha
Contents
Introduction 1-4
Writing System 5-10
The Avesta alphabet and its transcription
The punctuation in the manuscripts
Phonology 11-74
The phonemic system of the Orginal Perso-Aryan (OPA) language
The vowel system
The consonant system: glides, liquids, nasals, occlusives, fricatives, affricates, sibilants
Morphology 75-82
The structure of the morphemes, ablaut, word formation
Verbal Morphology 83-128
Stem formation 84-95
The present stem
Thematic presents : zero-grade root-a- ; reduplicated stems in -a- ; nasal presents ; i̯a-presents ; ai̯a-presents ; sa-presents ; suffix *-Sa- ; future presents ; other suffixes
Athematic presents : root presents ; reduplicated presents ; presents with nasal infix -n-/ -ná- ; presents with nasal suffix *-nu-/ *-náu̯- ; presents with an ablauting nasal suffix *-nā-/ *-n-
The aorist stem
Thematic aorist : the addition of an *-a- to the root ; reduplicated thematic aorist
Athematic root aorist
s-aorist
The perfect stem
Moods : present indicative, the injunctive (and imperfect), subjunctive, optative, imperative, perfect 96-121
Original Perso-Aryan personal endings
Present indicative
The injunctive (and the imperfect)
Subjunctive
Optative
Imperative
Perfect : indicative, subjunctive, optative
Non-finite verb forms 122-128
Verbal nouns
Infinitives
Participles : present , future and aorist active participles ; present and aorist middle participles ; perfect participles
Verbal adjectives
Gerundives
Verbal composition
Nominal Morphology 129-131
The nominal case-endings of OPA
The noun 132-170
Substantives and adjectives
comparative and superlative adjectives
Compounds : endocentric compounds, exocentric (or possessive) compounds
Case-endings of thematic nouns
Case-endings of athematic nouns : root nouns, s-stems, t-stems, n-stems, anč-stems, r-stems, r-/n-stems, i-stems, u-stems, ī-stems, ū-stems, ā-stems
The pronoun 171-187
The pronominal case-endings of the Original Perso-Aryan language
Personal pronouns
Demonstrative pronouns
Possessive pronouns
Relative pronoun
Interrogative and indefinite pronouns
Pronominal adverbs
Pronominal adjectives
The numeral 188-197
Cardinals
Ordinals
Numerals in composition
Multiplicative adverbs
Multiplicative adjectives
Fractions
Distributives
Collectives
Order of numerals
Other parts of speech 198-201
Adverbs
Adpositions and preverbs
Negation
Particles
Connections
Interjections
Introduction
According to the Perso-Aryan tradition, Avesta is the language of Daēnā. The word daēnā (from Original Perso-Aryan *dai̯anā– f.) means ‘vision; religion’.[1] It also means the text of the divine vision, the Avesta. The word avesta[2] comes from Perso-Aryan *upa-stāu̯-aka– ‘praise; praise-text’.[3] It was also used to denote the language of this sacred text.
The Corpus of the Avesta comprised of twenty-one books (Av. naska-), and was divided into three classes, “hymnic”, “scholastic” and “legal”.[4] This division is based on the Ahuna Vairya strophe which has three lines and twenty-one morphemes. The whole corpus consisted of twenty-one books, and a thousand chapters.[5] It was written down by the order of king Vištāspa.[6]
A Magian priest, Sēnburzmihr, compiled two liturgical collections, necessary for ritual and other hieratic contexts, the Dva.yasna[7] ˗ the Long Yasna[8] and the Short Yasna.
The transmission history of the Corpus of the Avesta involves a number of disruptions. The downfall of the Aryan Xšaça (the Achaemenian kingdom) by the attack of a mairya, Alexander, and the plunder and destruction of the palaces and temples and the massacre of the priests who were the repositories and communicators of the sacred wisdom, led to loss of a large number of texts.[9]
Due to the effort of some priests, women and minor children who pursued the study of the book arranged by Sēn-burzmihr the Dva.yasna returned to Drangiana, and thereafter to the whole Ērānšahr.
The Aršaka-dynasty took measures to re-open the aθauruna-schools (Pers. hērbedestān) in different lands and reassemble the scattered Avesta texts and other books on the basis of oral traditions and surviving manuscripts. “Valagš, descendant of Aršak, ordered that of the Avesta and Zand as had survived in purity, and also of the teaching as derived therefrom, everything that had survived the damage and turmoil of Alexander and the pillage and robbery of the Greeks, in a scattered state all over Ērānšahr (Persia), whether in written [form] or in oral transmission, as remained authoritative (as Canon), be preserved [exactly] as it had reached in the [Aryan] Land, and he ordered [the chiefs of] the land to make a record of it.”[10] The priests designed a script to represent Avesta as it was pronounced by them. Tōsar, a priestly teacher of the third century A.D., who was himself of the royal-Parthian house, became Ardašēr’s counsellor and accomplished the task of the restoration of the surviving Avesta texts.
Avesta is traditionally divided into two major dialects: gāhānīg, that is, the language of the Gāθā, the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti, and a number of short texts; and abestāg(īg), that is, the language of the other texts.[11] However, the latter itself does not appear to have been homogeneous. Avesta was the language of the daēnā par excellence for the Perso-Aryans with different languages in different lands, and a number of variants, either phonological or morphological, might come from the transmission of those whose mother tongue was not Avesta.
For notes see: Avesta: A Grammatical Précis, pp 1-4.
Purchase
For individuals situated within Iran, the book is available for acquisition at the designated address.
For those located outside Iran, it is advisable to forward your request via email to the Perso-Aryan Studies email address provided below:
PersoAryanStudies@gmail.com
