Indo-Iranian

[Stefan Georg]

>Looking at Watkins's chart of correspondences
>IE	Sanskrit	Avestan		Old Persian	OCS	Lithuanian
>k	s'		s		th		s	s
>kw	k/c		k/c		k		k/c^/c	k
>g	j		z/g		g/d		z	z
>gw	g/j		g/j		g/j		g/z^/z	g
>gh	h		g/z		g/d		z	z
>gwh	gh/h		g/j		g/j		g/z^/z	g

>	Why does Old Persian look as far removed [or more] from Avestan as
>any of the others?

Well, it's of course a different language ;-) I don't think the differences
as evidenced by this list of correspondences are very dramatic. We have a
secondary development s > th here (of course, it seems logically possible
that Avestan went through an intermediate stage *k' > th > s, in which case
the Old Persian stage would be a bit more archaic; I don't see at the
moment how to decide this). With the labiovelars, Watkins' list shows k/c
for Awestan (with /c/ as the result of the Law of the Palatals), but only
/k/ for Old Persian. Well, this doesn't seem correct to me (and I can't
tell from here whether the fault is really Watkins'), viz.: -ca: < *-kwe,
-ciy < *kwid, shiya:ta "happy" < *kwje:tos (rules: kwe > ca, kwi > ci, kwj
[or better: kwi  _V] > shiy; so no real difference here.
g' > d is indeed peculiar for Persian.

On the whole, I don't find these differences, and others holding between OP
and Aw. really drastic, but of course, they are different languages.

> What's the time difference?

Hard to say. The Achaemenid inscriptions are easily datable, they fall
mostly in the 6th/5th centuries B.C. Traditional datings of Zarathushtra
put him in the same time (mostly as a contemporary of Dareios I., but this
has been challenged, lately by Mary Boyce, who assigned him a date
considerably earlier on the time-scale (at least half a century up).
More important than the time  difference is, I think, a difference in
location. Wile OP is essentially the dialect of Fars in SW Iran (with a
smattering of Median influence, which language centered around the location
of present-day Teheran), the dialectal basis of Avestan is considerably
further in the East. Whether Avestan may already be classified as "Eastern
Iranian" is a matter of debate, for some researchers the distinction
between E and W Ir. begins to make sense only in Middle Iranian times; but,
then, few will take issue with OP being called "Old (South) West Iranian";
quite naturally, then, Aw. would have to be called "Old E Ir.", but the
snag is that it would be "East Iranian" without distinctive East Iranian
features. Geographically, at least, it can be roughly located in the
regions of Bactria, Mawarannahr (= Central Asian "Mesopotamia"), i.e.
Northern Afghanistan, Southern Uzbekistan in modern terms. But the figure
of Zarathushtra and the events of his religious revolution are quite
elusive and have not been pinned down by historians with last certainty. I
leave the rest to the experts.

>Is the difference between
>Avestan and Old Persian as great as the chart would indicate?

Gut feeling: no. If you read texts in both languages you'll always "feel"
them being quite closely related languages, what you've learned in the OP
class, will help you in the Avestan class, and vice versa. Avestan has the
reputation of being one of the "hardest" older IE languages to master, but
this - at least for the Gatha dialect - is imho more due to the arcane
contents of the texts, the proper understanding of which demands an
intimate knowledge of Zarathustrian religion and its peculiar system of
religious semantics, something few people can boast to have. OP texts,
othoh, are more of the "I am the greatest and if you dare stand up against
me I will smite you, some day XY tried and I smote him"-type, that's why
they are preferred in beginners' classes (it's like Julius Caesar, who
"simply cannot have been a great man, since he wrote only for beginners'
Latin classes", as a popular saying has it here). Old Persian is, due to
the limited number and stereotypical content of its extant texts, also more
defectively preserved, so a good deal of its morphology is simply unknown
(e.g. only one verb is attested in the optative and only one in the
perfect; incidentally, both verbal categories are attested in one and the
same hapax legomenon etc.).

St.G.

Dr. Stefan Georg
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Tel./Fax +49-228-691332