Frauennamen im Rigveda und im Avesta.

• Position: Book review

Frauennamen im Rigveda und im Avesta: Studien zur Onomastik des altesten Indischen und Iranischen. By ULLA REMMER. Iranische Onomastik, no. 3. Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte, vol. 745. Vienna: VERLAG DER OSTERREICHISCHEN AKADEMIE DER WISSENSCHAFTEN, 2006. Pp. 288.

This volume is a revised version of a University of Zurich dissertation (2005) and a product of the larger, Swiss-financed project "Die indogermanischen Frauennamen," under the general direction of Dr. Karin Stuber. It explores with substantial learning and meticulous philological care every proposed female name in the Rig Veda and in the Avesta, paying particular attention to possible etymology (/-ies), formation (compound type, etc.), and semantics. Between a brief (twenty-five-page) introduction and a similarly brief set of conclusions, the bulk of the book treats both clear and potential feminine names case-by-case, first in the Rig Veda (in Sanskrit alphabetical order), then the Avesta. The Rigvedic portion is the shorter one (approximately seventy-five pages), since that text contains only thirteen fairly certain female names (not including goddesses, but including mythological and semi-divine beings like Yami and Urvasi), and about the same number of uncertain ones. The Avestan portion (something over a hundred pages) is swelled primarily by the list of twenty-seven female names in the Fravardin Yast, Yt 13.139-42 (in addition to approximately four hundred male names in the same test, both males and female being pious people, each under the protection of a Fravasi). She first treats these names, in the order of the text, then the few other possible female names in the rest of the Avesta.

The author is well aware of the difficulties of the enterprise. It is notoriously difficult and frequently futile to etymologize personal names. On the one hand, it is often hard to determine whether a word applied to an individual in an ancient text is an actual name or merely an appellative descriptor (Bluebeard or blue-beard[ed]). On the other, since names need not (and usually do not) reflect textual context, nor need they accurately characterize the current bearer of the name (the number of living Smiths who work metal is probably miniscule), nothing constrains the etymology of a name, beyond the general outlines of onomastic practice. Moreover, names are frequently subject to linguistically irregular hypochoristic...