Doctor Raiomond. The Avestā: a lexico-statistical analysis (direct and reverse indexes, hapax legomena and frequency counts)

Louvain: Peeters, 2004. — 696 p. — (Acta Iranica 41).The Avesta has been studied and analysed in the West for over the past two centuries and more. However unlike the case of Vedic where there is an easy and ready means of ascertaining the mantras (Bloomfield’s Vedic Concordance. Cambridge. Mass. 1906), there exists no definitive index to the Avesta, which would permit the user to exhaustively locate all and every occurrence of a given word within the major Avestan texts. Attempts have been made in the past to provide such a facility in the form of a concordance, but these have been desultory and sporadic and an index referencing all the major Avestan texts does not exist. Similarly a Reverse index to the Avestan texts which would allow the scholar to identify each and every word in the Avesta by its ending is a desideratum, which has never been met. The present study aims to fill these lacunae. As the title indicates, the book is essentially an Index (both Direct and Reverse) of the Geldnerian version of the Avestâ (Karl F. Geldner, Avesta, the Sacred Books of the Parsis, Stuttgart, 1896), which is still considered to be the normative version. The lists have been generated by computer and subsequently checked manually. These indexes are supplemented by computer-generated lexicostatistical data as to the frequencies of individual characters as well as their combinations, the canonical forms of the Avestan words, length-wise sorts of all Avestan words and minimal pairs, both consonantal and vocalic of the Avestâ. The data on the basis of which these analyses have been made was entered by hand over a period of two years, between 1995-1997. The data has been subsequently checked, validated and additions and corrections have been made by comparison with Avestan texts available on the web, especially two sites where a large database of Avestan texts is stored : www,avesta,org and the Titus server maintained by Dr Jost Gippert.