The Avestan Vowels.

• Author: Tucker, Elizabeth
• Position: Book review

The Avestan Vowels. By MICHIEL DE VAAN. Leiden Studies in Indo-European, vol. 12. Amsterdam: RODOPI, 2003. Pp. xxxv + 710. [euro]160.

Michiel de Vaan's book, based on his 2002 Leiden doctoral thesis, is not for the faint-hearted Avestologist. It presents and analyzes a huge body of material collected from the Titus electronic text edition of the Avesta (checked against the printed editions), and it tackles a whole gamut of problems concerning Avestan diachronic phonology.

One of the book's virtues is its layout: each chapter is devoted to a related group of vowels, and concludes with a summary of the findings. A useful final chapter highlights the most important conclusions, provides an overview of the different chronological stages of development, and tabulates all the possible diachronic interpretations for the fifteen vowel signs and their combinations that are employed in the manuscripts. An appendix of proposed corrections to Geldner's edition is followed by a set of indices, which makes it easy to locate the discussion of any Avestan word. (1) It will be used for reference, and there are shocks for the Indo-Europeanist, such as the doubts cast on the long vowel of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] 'liver' (pp. 68-69).

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this study is the attempt to work out a relative chronology for the changes that resulted in the spellings of the archetype manuscript and its much later descendants, which provide our only source for the Avestan language. De Vaan concludes that Old Avestan (OAv.) had a system of only six simple vowel (i, i, a, a, u, u), and that the expansion of the inherited Indo-Iranian system belongs to the Late Young Avestan (YAv.) period (with an eleven-vowel system: i, i, e, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], a, a, a (= a), a, o, u, u). However, many of the developments that give Avestan a very different appearance from Old Persian (not only i-epenthesis, u-epenthesis, etc., but also, for instance, *-hrt- > -s-, *-an, *-am > -an, -am) are situated in the "Post YAv." period leading up to the archetype, that is, during the centuries of transmission when Avestan was no longer a living language. The introduction presents the view that YAv. merely represents a later form of OAv., with morphological simplifications, but nothing that cannot represent a direct continuation of the same Avestan dialect, and this is reaffirmed with additional evidence from vowel developments in the conclusion. Within YAv...