The Khawarezmian Element in the Qunyat al-Munya.

• Author: Yoshida, Y.

Choresmian (or Khwarezmian, the appellation preferred by MacKenzie, cf. BSOAS 54 [1991]: 173) is the ancient language of Choresm, the country south of the Aral Sea. It is one of the Eastern Middle Iranian languages, to which belong Sogdian, Bactrian, and the languages of the Saka (Khotanese and Tumshuqese). Apart from raising the intriguing question as to whether it has a direct connection with Avestan, i.e., the language of Airiianem vaejo (on which subject see now MacKenzie, East and West 38 [19881: 81-92), the Choresmian language has aroused an interest of its own ever since the brief report by W. B. Henning, the great pioneer of Choresmian philological studies.

Two stages of Choresmian are attested, one written in the script developed from the Imperial Aramaic of the Achaemenian era and the other in Arabo-Persian script provided with a new letter c t) representing [ts] and [dz]. Our knowledge of this language has mainly been gained from the latter source, called Late Choresmian or Islamic Choresmian, as against the former, generally referred to as Middle Choresmian or Aramaeo-Choresmian. Of Islamic Choresmian two major sources are known. One is the almost complete ms (c. A.D. 1200) of al-Zamaxsari's Arabic dictionary, the Muqaddimat al-adab, with the interlinear Choresmian glosses (hereafter Muq.). The other is a group of Arabic law books which record a number of Choresmian sentences or words illustrating case-law. Among them, the Qunyat al-Munya, compiled by Mukhtar al-Zahidi al-Ghazmini (d. A.5. 1260), was the most popular and was copied many times.

After the publication of J. Benzing's Chwaresmischer Wortindex (Wiesbaden, 1983), which includes all the lexical elements housed in the Muq., the most urgent desideratum in the field of Choresmian philology has been a reliable edition of the Choresmian material contained in the Qunya. This task has been hindered, if not prohibited, by the inaccessibility of the best copy of the Qunya, which was discovered in Astrakhan and is now preserved in St. Petersburg as C231 1. To this ms is appended a copy of a booklet generally known as the Risala, which is a resume of the Qunya and contains nearly all the Choresmian words and sentences found in the latter, as well as others cited from its predecessor, the Munyat alFuqaha' Fuqaha of Fakhr al-din Qubzani. It is true that A. A. Frejman published two-thirds of about 400 Choresmian sentences contained in the Qunya as long ago as 1951. However, his...