Avestan language

Avestan is an Eastern Old Iranian language that was used to compose the hymns of the Zoroastrian holy book, the Avesta. Iranian languages are part of the Indo-Iranian Language group which includes the Indo-Aryan languages such as Sanskrit. The Indo-Iranian language group is the major eastern branch of the Indo-European languages.

Along with Old Persian, Avestan is one of the two oldest Iranian languages of which we have evidence.

The Avestan language, as reflected in the Avesta, is divided into two different stages:

Old Avestan or Gathic Avestan: This form of the language was used to compose the Gathas and Yasna Haptanghaiti, probably by Zoroaster himself. Gathic Avestan is an archaic language with a complicated grammar which consists of eight case forms and a highly inflected noun system. It is still quite close to the Vedic Sanskrit. Like Zoroaster's lifetime, widely differing dates for Avestan have been proposed; scholarly consensus floats around 1000 BC (roughly contemporary to the Brahmana period of Vedic Sanskrit).
Young Avestan: the language used for composing the major parts of Avesta, including the rest of the Yasnas, the Yashts, and Vidaevdat. Young Avestan itself has two forms, one called Original Young Avestan, and the other, Artificial Young Avestan. The first form was probably a natural development of Old Avestan and was most likely also a spoken language up to the 8th century BCE. The Artificial Young Avestan however is a corrupt form of the language, a form that was never spoken and was used by the priests (Magi) in later times in order to compose new texts. Vidaevdat is the most significant text that was composed in Artificial Young Avestan.

Classification

Avestan is usually classified as Eastern Iranian. However, because the separation of Eastern and Western Iranian is poorly understood, and because there is no attestation of an Iranian language contemporary to Avestan, as well as because of the defective tradition of the Avestan texts, the validity, or even applicability, of this classification is uncertain.

For example, Avestan jwa "live" is cited as closer to Sogdian žw, Khotanian juv- than to Old Persian jīva, but phonological Eastern characteristics of Avestan such as this one have been suspected of being due to a phase of the historical tradition of the texts rather than an original feature of Avestan itself. According to KellensCompendium Linguarum Iranicarum (1989), p. 35, the only thing that can be asserted with confidence is that Avestan is not a Persian dialect (the only Old Iranian language besides Avestan known in any detail being Old Persian). The original geographical location of Avestan is likewise uncertain, and it has been variously placed in north-western Iran, north-eastern Iran, Chorasmia, Sistan, and Bactria-Margiana.

Alphabet

The Avesta was not written until at least the first century AD, and most likely until 4th century AD. The script used for the writing of Avesta, called Dīn Dabireh, during the Sassanian times (226–650 AD) was a derivative of Pahlavi script of Middle Persian. Dīn Dabireh is specially designed to reflect the Avestan sound system, not unlike Devanāgarī, it allows phonetic disambiguation of allophones.

Phonology

The Avestan sound differs from the later Old Persian chiefly by the larger inventory of vowels. As opposed to Sanskrit, Avestan has retained voiced sibilants, and has fricative rather than aspirate series. There are various conventions for transliteration of Dīn Dabireh, the one adopted for this article being:

Vowels:

Consonants:

The glides y and w are often transcribed as ii and uu, imitating Dīn Dabireh orthography.

Consonants

	Labial		Dental		Alveolar		Post-alveolar		Palatal		Velar		Labiovelar		Post-uvular		Glottal
Plosives
Implosives
Fricatives
Approximants
Nasals
Trill
Lateral

Vowels

	short	short	short
	front	central	back
close
mid
open

Notes

References

Robert S. P. Beekes, A Grammar of Gatha-Avestan, E.J. Brill: Leiden, New York, København, Köln 1988 ISBN 90-04-08332-4
Karl Hoffmann & Bernhard Forssman, Avestische Laut- und Flexionslehre (Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft 84), Universität Innsbruck 1996 ISBN 3-85124-652-7

External links

avesta.org - Avestan lessons, Grammar, Dictionaries, etc.
Avestan alphabet (Omniglot.com)
Text samples
Avestan fonts
Unicode pipeline (contains suggestion for Avestan encoding)
Avestan Language entries in the Encyclopedia Iranica

Eastern Iranian languages | Iranian languages Avesta | Extinct languages of Asia

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