A Grammar Of The Old Persian Language With The Inscriptions Of The Achaemenian Kings And Vocabulary

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An excerpt from the Author's note 'To The Reader' : This book does not claim to be a contribution to Iranian subjects. In these recent years there has been such an advancement in this line of scholarship that Sanskrit students have been compelled to surrender this field to specialists among whom in America the name of Dr. A. V. Williams Jackson of Columbia College is conspicuous. In 1862 Haug published an outline of Avesta grammar in the first edition of his essays. At that time seventy octavo pages were sufficient to contain the discovered material. Two years later Justi's grammar of one hundred and fifteen octavo pages was looked upon as practically exhaustive. The grammar of Spiegel appeared in 1867, that of de Harlez in 1878, that of Geiger in 1879. Kavasji Edalji's grammar (1891) and Jackson's grammar (1892) extend four-fold the horizon of Avestan scholarship as contrasted with the outline presented by Hang thirty years before, although the same quantity of text of the Avesta is the basis for grammatical work. This statement can enable the reader to realize the great strides this study has made during a few years. My work in the Zend Avesta and in the dialects of Persia has been simply an avocation from my chosen field of Sanskrit. No book has been published in English containing the grammar, text and vocabulary of all the Old Persian Inscriptions. It was this fact that induced the author in 1891 to issue a little volume entitled "Old Persian Grammar" the copies of which have now been sold. The first fifty pages of the present volume, which contain the grammatical principles, are based on this work. The following features characterize this volume on Old Persian Inscriptions. (1.) The grammatical principles arranged as a grammar of the language. (2.) The complete classification of all the verb-forms occurring in the inscriptions. (3.) The transliterated text. The portion supplied by conjecture has been inserted without brackets unless the conjectural reading be doubtful. (4) The references at the bottom of the page in the text which call the attention of the student to the grammar on the first occurrence of a form or principle. (5.) The cuneiform text. (6.) The translation. (7.) The vocabulary giving the related words in Sanskrit, Latin, Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, etc....