Avestica 1: a perfect participle: vaoxuuanho.

• Author: Skjaervo, P. Oktor

It has been repeatedly pointed out by Karl Hoffmann that the "prolegomena" and critical apparatus of Karl E Geldner's edition of the Avesta (Avesta the Sacred Book of the Parsis, 3 vols. [Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 188695]) were as important as Geldner's text itself, if not more so. The "prolegomena," although written only after his edition was completed, contain Geldner's analysis of the stemmata of his manuscripts. It is important to keep in mind that while he was compiling the edition Geldner did not yet fully appreciate the relative merit of the manuscripts and so frequently adopted readings in his text that belonged to inferior manuscripts. Geldner gradually became aware of this fact himself but had no inclination to produce a second edition.

Important improvements to the text were made by Christian Bartholomae, whose dictionary (Altiranisches Worterbuch [Strassburg: K. J. Trubner, 1904]) notes carefully the readings of the superior manuscripts for a large number of words. Even so, numerous inferior readings remained, for the most part ignored by subsequent generations of scholars, for whom Geldner's Avesta represented almost as much of a canonized text as the Rigveda. At most they would adopt Bartholomae's revisions, carefully marked by his "+", as if an emendation rather than the readings of the best manuscripts. It was not until K. Hoffmann's groundbreaking studies of the 1960s and early 1970s that (some) Avestan scholars began to appreciate the true nature of Geldner's edition and to apply Hoffmann's rigorous standards for Avestan scholarship.

In this brief communication, Hoffmann's principles of Avestan text criticism are employed to restore to the text the reading of the best manuscript, a philologically expected lexical item, and a linguistically predicted form.

The active perfect participle in Indo-Iranian languages is formed by attaching the suffix uah-/-us- (long, full, and zero grades) to the weak form of the perfect stem.(2) As a consequence, forms with zero grade of the stem but full grade of the suffix from verbs with the stem pattern [C.sub.1]V[C.sub.2] will contain sequences of three consonants of the type [C.sub.1][C.sub.2]u-. Such clusters of three consonants are tolerated in some instances, but in others the group is resolved by substituting the full grade for the zero grade or eased, as it were, by changing or eliminating one of the consonants. In Avestan itself these clusters were realized as [C.sub.1][C.sub.2]uu...