Aban Yasht: A Review of the Critique of its Critique

Abstract

In the 3rd issue of the Journal of Language Science, Ehsan Changizi wrote a review on the Aban Yasht written by Changiz Mowlaee. In the 4th issue of the same journal, Mowlaee wrote a critique of that review and evaluated it as being false and incorrect in terms of its contents. In Mowlaee’s response, some subjects of the Avestan language are propounded that must be examined in more detail and be analyzed from the linguistic point of view. In the present article, the most important points are categorized in six classes, but under each subject the other subjects such as phoneme and sound, root, enclitic, clitic and host, relative pronoun or demonstrative pronoun ya, copula verb and attributive clause, predicate possession, enclitic pronoun mē and functions of ethical dative are also discussed. In these discussions it has become clear that for studying ancient texts it is necessary to be familiar with generalities of linguistics. It is only by using modern linguistic issues that one can study the Avestan language free from its rules of writing system. For instance, in Avestan writing system the enclitic pronouns are written separately from their hosts and after each of them a dot has been written. In transcribing the ancient texts, on the other hand, these pronouns should be written connected to their hosts since the pronounced form of the ancient texts is shown in the transcription.

Keywords

• phoneme
• root
• enclitic
• demonstrative pronoun
• copula