Avestan (), or historically Zend, is an umbrella term for two
Old Iranian languages
The Iranian languages or Iranic languages are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family that are spoken natively by the Iranian peoples, predominantly in the Iranian Plateau.
The Iranian languages are grouped ...
: Old Avestan (spoken in the 2nd millennium BCE) and Younger Avestan (spoken in the 1st millennium BCE). They are known only from their conjoined use as the scriptural language of
Zoroastrianism, and the
Avesta
The Avesta () is the primary collection of religious texts of Zoroastrianism, composed in the Avestan language.
The Avesta texts fall into several different categories, arranged either by dialect, or by usage. The principal text in the lit ...
likewise serves as their namesake. Both are early
Eastern Iranian languages within the
Indo-Iranian language branch of the
Indo-European language family. Its immediate ancestor was the
Proto-Iranian language, a sister language to the
Proto-Indo-Aryan language, with both having developed from the earlier
Proto-Indo-Iranian language; as such, Old Avestan is quite close in both grammar and lexicon to
Vedic Sanskrit, the oldest preserved
Indo-Aryan language
The Indo-Aryan languages (or sometimes Indic languages) are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily concentrated in India, Pa ...
.
The Avestan text corpus was composed in the ancient Iranian
satrapies of
Arachosia,
Aria
In music, an aria ( Italian: ; plural: ''arie'' , or ''arias'' in common usage, diminutive form arietta , plural ariette, or in English simply air) is a self-contained piece for one voice, with or without instrumental or orchestral accompa ...
,
Bactria, and
Margiana
Margiana ( el, ''Margianḗ'', Old Persian: ''Marguš'', Middle Persian: ''Marv'') is a historical region centred on the oasis of Merv and was a minor satrapy within the Achaemenid satrapy of Bactria, and a province within its successors, the Se ...
, corresponding to the entirety of present-day
Afghanistan
Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,; prs, امارت اسلامی افغانستان is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. Referred to as the Heart of Asia, it is bordere ...
as well as parts of
Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan, and
Uzbekistan. The
Yaz culture
The Yaz culture (named after the type site Yaz-Tappe, Yaz Tepe, or Yaz Depe, near Baýramaly, Turkmenistan) was an early Iron Age culture of Margiana, Bactria and Sogdia (ca. 1500–500 BC, or ca. 1500–330 BC). It emerges at the top of late Bro ...
of
Bactria–Margiana has been regarded as a likely archaeological reflection of the early "
Eastern Iranian" culture that is described in the Zoroastrian Avesta.
Genealogy
Scholars traditionally classify Iranian languages as "old", "middle" and "new" according to their age, and as "eastern" or "western" according to geography, and within this framework Avestan is classified as
Eastern
Eastern may refer to:
Transportation
*China Eastern Airlines, a current Chinese airline based in Shanghai
*Eastern Air, former name of Zambia Skyways
*Eastern Air Lines, a defunct American airline that operated from 1926 to 1991
*Eastern Air Li ...
Old Iranian. But the east–west distinction is of limited meaning for Avestan, as the linguistic developments that later distinguish Eastern from Western Iranian had not yet occurred. Avestan does not display some typical (South-)Western Iranian innovations already visible in Old Persian, and so in this sense, "eastern" only means "non-western".
Old Avestan is closely related to
Old Persian and largely agrees morphologically with
Vedic Sanskrit. The old ancestor dialect of
Pashto was close to the language of the
Gathas.
Forms and stages of development
The Avestan language is attested in roughly two forms, known as "Old Avestan" (or "Gathic Avestan") and "Younger Avestan". Younger Avestan did not evolve from Old Avestan; the two differ not only in time, but are also different dialects.
Every Avestan text, regardless of whether originally composed in Old or Younger Avestan, underwent several transformations.
Karl Hoffmann traced the following stages for Avestan as found in the extant texts. In roughly chronological order:
* The natural language of the composers of the ''
Gathas'', the ''
Yasna Haptanghaiti'', the four sacred prayers (''Y.'' 27 and 54).
* Changes precipitated by slow chanting
* Changes to Old Avestan due to transmission by native speakers of Younger Avestan
* The natural language of the scribes who wrote grammatically correct Younger Avestan texts
* Deliberate changes introduced through "standardization"
* Changes introduced by transfer to regions where Avestan was not spoken
* Adaptions/translations of portions of texts from other regions
* Composition of ungrammatical late Avestan texts
*
Phonetic notation
Phonetic transcription (also known as phonetic script or phonetic notation) is the visual representation of speech sounds (or ''phones'') by means of symbols. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, such as the I ...
of the Avestan texts in the
Sasanian archetype
* Post-Sasanian deterioration of the written transmission due to incorrect pronunciation
* Errors and corruptions introduced during copying
Many phonetic features cannot be ascribed with certainty to a particular stage since there may be more than one possibility. Every phonetic form that can be ascribed to the Sasanian archetype on the basis of critical assessment of the manuscript evidence must have gone through the stages mentioned above so that "Old Avestan" and "Young Avestan" really mean no more than "Old Avestan and Young Avestan of the
Sasanian period
The Sasanian () or Sassanid Empire, officially known as the Empire of Iranians (, ) and also referred to by historians as the Neo-Persian Empire, was the History of Iran, last Iranian empire before the early Muslim conquests of the 7th-8th cen ...
".
Alphabet
The script used for writing Avestan developed during the 3rd or 4th century AD. By then the language had been extinct for many centuries, and remained in use only as a liturgical language of the Avesta canon. As is still the case today, the liturgies were memorized by the priesthood and recited by rote.
The script devised to render Avestan was natively known as ''
Din dabireh'' "religion writing". It has 53 distinct characters and is written right-to-left. Among the 53 characters are about 30 letters that are – through the addition of various loops and flourishes – variations of the 13 graphemes of the
cursive Pahlavi script (i.e. "Book" Pahlavi) that is known from the post-Sassanian texts of Zoroastrian tradition. These symbols, like those of all the Pahlavi scripts, are in turn based on
Aramaic script
The Aramaic languages, short Aramaic ( syc, ܐܪܡܝܐ, Arāmāyā; oar, 𐤀𐤓𐤌𐤉𐤀; arc, 𐡀𐡓𐡌𐡉𐡀; tmr, אֲרָמִית), are a language family containing many varieties (languages and dialects) that originated in ...
symbols. Avestan also incorporates several letters from other writing systems, most notably the vowels, which are mostly derived from Greek minuscules. A few letters were free inventions, as were also the symbols used for punctuation. Also, the Avestan alphabet has one letter that has no corresponding sound in the Avestan language; the character for (a sound that Avestan does not have) was added to write
Pazend texts.
The Avestan script is
alphabetic, and the large number of letters suggests that its design was due to the need to render the orally recited texts with high phonetic precision. The correct enunciation of the liturgies was (and still is) considered necessary for the prayers to be effective.
The Zoroastrians of India, who represent one of the largest surviving Zoroastrian communities worldwide, also transcribe Avestan in
Brahmi-based scripts. This is a relatively recent development first seen in the ca. 12th century texts of Neryosang Dhaval and other Parsi Sanskritist theologians of that era, which are roughly contemporary with the oldest surviving manuscripts in Avestan script. Today, Avestan is most commonly typeset in the
Gujarati script (
Gujarati being the traditional language of the Indian Zoroastrians). Some Avestan letters with no corresponding symbol are synthesized with additional diacritical marks, for example, the in ''zaraθuštra'' is written with ''j'' with a dot below.
Phonology
Avestan has retained voiced sibilants, and has fricative rather than aspirate series. There are various conventions for transliteration of Dīn Dabireh, the one adopted for this article being:
Vowels:
:a ā ə ə̄ e ē o ō å ą i ī u ū
Consonants:
:k g γ x xʷ č ǰ t d δ θ t̰ p b β f
:ŋ ŋʷ ṇ ń n m y w r s z š ṣ̌ ž h
The glides ''y'' and ''w'' are often transcribed as ''ii'' and ''uu'', imitating Dīn Dabireh orthography. The letter transcribed ''t̰'' indicates an allophone of with
no audible release
A stop with no audible release, also known as an unreleased stop or an applosive, is a stop consonant with no release burst: no audible indication of the end of its occlusion (hold). In the International Phonetic Alphabet, lack of an audible rele ...
at the end of a word and before certain
obstruents.
Consonants
According to Beekes, and are allophones of and respectively (in Old Avestan).
Vowels
Grammar
Nouns
Verbs
Sample text
Example phrases
The following phrases were
phonetically transcribed from Avestan:
Avestan and Sanskrit
Avestan is extremely similar to Vedic Sanskrit, as demonstrated by this sample text:
See also
*
Proto-Indo-European language
*
Proto-Indo-Iranian language
*
Vedic Sanskrit
Explanatory notes
Citations
General sources
* .
* .
*
* .
* .
* .
External links
Encyclopedia Avestica an online etymological glossary covering most of the corpus of the language
Information on Avestan languageat avesta.org
Old Iranian Online(including Old and Young Avestan) by Scott L. Harvey and Jonathan Slocum, free online lessons at th
Linguistics Research Centerat the
University of Texas at Austin
Old Avestanan
at Harvard University
an
at TITUS.
*
*
an online collection of introductory videos to ancient Indo-European languages produced by the University of Göttingen
{{DEFAULTSORT:Avestan Language
Ancient languages
Avesta
Eastern Iranian languages
Extinct languages of Asia
Language articles with unknown extinction date
Sacred languages