The Encoding of Avestan - Problems and Solutions

Avestan’ is the name of the ritual language of Zoroastrianism, which was the state religion of the Iranian empire in Achaemenid, Arsacid and Sasanid times, covering a time span of more than 1200 years. It is named after the ‘Avesta’, i.e., the collection of holy scriptures that form the basis of the religion which was allegedly founded by Zarathushtra, also known as Zoroaster, by about the beginning of the first millennium B.C. Together with Vedic Sanskrit, Avestan represents one of the most archaic witnesses of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages, which makes it especially interesting for historical-comparative linguistics. This is why the texts of the Avesta were among the first objects of electronic corpus building that were undertaken in the framework of Indo-European studies, leading to the establishment of the TITUS database (‘Thesaurus indogermanischer Textund Sprachmaterialien’). 2 Today, the complete Avestan corpus is available, together with elaborate search functions and an extended version of the subcorpus of the so-called ‘Yasna’, which covers a great deal of the attestation of variant readings. Right from the beginning of their computational work concerning the Avesta, the compilers had to cope with the fact that the texts contained in it have been transmitted in a special script written from right to left, which was also used for printing them in the scholarly editions used until today. It goes without saying that there was no way in the middle of the 1980s to encode the Avestan scriptures exactly as they are found in the manuscripts. Instead, we had to rely upon transcriptional devices that were dictated by the restrictions of character encoding as provided by the computer systems used. As the problems we had to face in this respect and the solutions we could apply are typical for the development of computational work on ancient languages, it seems worthwhile to sketch them out here. 1 The Avestan script and its transcription 1.1 Early western approaches to the Avestan script and its transcription The Avestan script has been known to western scholarship since the 17 century when the first accounts of the religion of the ‘Parsees’, i.e., Zoroastrians living in India and Iran, were published. The first notable description of the script is found in the travel report by JEAN CHARDIN who sojourned in Iran in 1673–7; in the 1711 edition of his report, the author provides an ‘alphabet of the ancient Persians’, together with a lithographed table contrasting the characters of the Avestan script with their Perso-Arabian equivalents; cf. the extract illustrated in Fig. 1.