The Avesta: A Lexico-Statistical Analysis (Direct and Reverse Indexes, Hapax Legomena and Frequency Counts).

• Author: Skjaervo, Prods Oktor
• Position: Book review

The Avesta: A Lexico-Statistical Analysis (Direct and Reverse Indexes, Hapax Legomena and Frequency Counts). By RAIOMUND DOCTOR. Acta Iranica, vol. 41. Louvain: PEETERS, 2004. Pp. 666. [euro]105; $116.

The aim of this book, as stated in the introduction (p. 1), is to provide a tool that, like Bloomfield's Vedic Concordance (1906), "would permit the user to exhaustively locate all and every occurrence of a given word within the major Avestan texts," as well as a reverse index that "would allow the scholar to identify each and every word in the Avesta by its ending." In practice, it is "an Index ... of the Geldnerian version of the Avesta ... which is still considered to be the normative version." In addition, the book contains "computer-generated lexicostatistical data as to the frequencies of individual words, length-wise sorts of all Avestan words and minimal pairs."

The corpus that has been indexed is Geldner's text, and the alphabetical order is that of Bartholomae's Altiranisches Worterbuch. This means, for instance, that forms that Geldner preferred in his Prolegomena and later were used in the Altiranisches Worterbuch are not listed here. Nor is a century of corrections to Geldner's text taken into account; for example, Geldner's vispaiia.irina (Y 19.17, after the Pahlavi Yasna manuscripts) is listed under vispaiia and irina, although it was emended by Benveniste (1964) to vispaiieirina (after the Persian Videvdad Sade mss. vispaiie.irina and the Yasna Sade mss. vispiie.irina). It also means that a large part of the Avestan vocabulary, that of the texts not in Geldner, is not included (see p. 3). This part of the vocabulary is, of course, included in the Altiranisches Worterbuch. The transcription is also that of Altiranisches Worterbuch. Thus the letter [[eta].sup.v] ([[eta].sup.v]h) is not included, [[eta].sup.v] ([[eta].sup.v]h) is used only rarely, and the old h is used for x.

There are three main indexes: an alphabetical index of all the words in Geldner's Avesta, a reverse index of same, and an index of hapax legomena. The main index contains the bare words in Geldner's corpus with references. It is therefore nothing like Bloomfield's Vedic Concordance, which gives the words in context. The reader still needs to refer to Geldner, Bartholomae's Altiranisches Worterbuch, and later literature. For no stated reason, Pazand words, i.e., Middle and New Persian words in Avestan script found in Geldner, have been included, but without...