Zum Namengut des Avesta By Manfred Mayrhoferw (review)

770 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 3 (1978) Zum Namengut des Avesta. By Manfred Mayrhofer. Vienna: Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften , 1977. Pp. 68. This work will introduce the reader to an area of research, recently very active, on the onomastics of the ancient IE languages of Iran. That activity has principally involved German-speaking scholars of central Europe, althoughan occasional Frenchman or Englishman has participated. So far as I know, no Americans are engaged. This lack of American interest is worth mentioning, inasmuch as the data which have been so busily and successfully studied by Europeans were originally supplied by American publications (G. C. Cameron, Persepolis treasury tablets, Chicago, 1948; R. T. Hallock, Persepolis fortification tablets, Chicago, 1969.) The failure of American researchers to appear in the current bibliography of work on the structure and history ofnames ofpersons in Old Persian and Avestic is not, I think, because of lack of interest in IE studies; it probably is to be attributed to an attitude, common among American linguists, that the study of names does not have the status possessed by other branches of the discipline. In Europe, however , both onomastics and IE linguistics continue to flourish. What we know of the Old Persian and Avestic languages is limited by the content of the literary and epigraphic documents; in addition, relatively few personal names have come down to us. Excavations conducted by the University of Chicago during the thirties, on the site of the Achaemenian royal center called Persepolis, have produced a mass of recently published inscriptions in Elamite, the non-IE tongue of a subject people. These documents contain some 1900 personal names, of which about 1700 seem to be originally Iranian, but wearing an Elamite dress. The study of this corpus has contributed much to our knowledge of the ancient Iranian lexicon; e.g., names frequently contain lexemes which have become obsolete in their function as common nouns. (Cf. Eng. Robert < Gmc. *Hröd berxt 'having bright fame': hröd- 'fame' is an element otherwise obsolete in English.) It has also greatly helped our understanding of the system of personal names in ancient IE languages. Principal repositories of recent research in this subject are books by M. Mayrhofer (Onomástica persepolitana, Wien, 1973 [reviewed by H. P. Schmidt in Lg. 52.245-7, 1976]) and by W. Hinz (Wiesbaden, 1975). The latter work bears the title Altiranisches Sprachgut der Nebenüberlieferungen; this last term (which might be translated as 'secondary, lateral tradition') means the use of loanwords into foreign languages to elucidate features for which the target language affords no data. The accretion of new material has stimulated a renewed interest in Old Iranian personal names; this is manifested by the commitment of the Austrian Academy of Sciences to sponsor a major restudy of all Old Iranian personal names—constituting, in a sense, a new edition of the last comprehensive treatment of the subject, the Iranisches Namenbuch of F. Justi (Marburg, 1895). A part of that project will be the re-examination of the personal names of the Avesta; and it is as an introduction to such an undertaking that the brochure under review is published. There are said to be about 400 personal names preserved in the sacred writings of the Zoroastrian faith. The present volume demonstrates the methods Mayrhofer proposes to apply to the analysis and to the history of this corpus, and to the problem of the original meanings of the names. The knowledge gained from the study of the Elamite tablets about Old Persian, and about Iranian personal names in general, will be applied to the interpretation of the Avestic material. It will also be necessary to apply the techniques of textual criticism and of philological method to these data. A recent scholarly development in this area is the insight that reflections of an IE poetic language , occurring both in the Avesta and in the Veda, can be seen in some of the names. Two examples will illustrate some things that can be learned about Avestic in this way. First, the name Dästägni- is thought to contain, in its second component -agni-, a derivative of an old IE word for 'fire', a word which otherwise does not occur in Iranian (cf. Avest. ätars-, NPers. ätes, both 'fire'). Second, the name of Iran's prophet is known in two forms, Avest. ZarathuStra and Greek Zoroaster; it is guessed that these come from different dialects, and that they represent Old Iranian forms such as zarat-ustra and zara-ustra. The second element of these compounds is the IndoIranian word for 'camel'; the first is verbal, BOOK NOTICES 771 perhaps meaning 'to drive'. The presence or lack of the medial -/- derives from two contrasting patterns in the formation of PIE nominal compounds. [Madison Beeler, Berkeley.] Gramática asuriní: aspectos de urna gramática transformacional e discursos monologados da lingua asuriní, familia tupi guaraní. By Carl H. Harrison. Translated by Mary L. Daniel. (Série lingüistica, 4.) Brasilia, D.F. : Summer Institute ofLinguistics, 1976. Pp. 175. Asuriní appears to be a fascinating language , potentially of great interest to typologists ; but it is difficult to learn all one might want to from Harrison's grammar, a revision of his 1970 Pennsylvania dissertation. H presents here the first transformational treatment of a Brazilian Tupi-Guarani language , using an ambitious discourse-oriented model whose first symbol is not Sentence] but Discourse] (only after the subsequent generation of P[aragraph] do we get to S). The book itself contains an introduction (5 pp.), a structural sketch (9 pp.), a semantic-feature analysis of part ofthe Asuriní lexicon (61 pp.), a discussion of the principal transformations (44 pp.), a typological note contrasting Asuriní and Portuguese (4 pp.), and an analysed text (13 pp.) Two appendices further treat various lexical/syntactic and morphophonemic rules. The treatment of the phonology is sketchy at best. H introduces the phonemes in a footnote , and the morphology appendix is hard to work through. The interested reader is referred to H's article ' The morphonology of Asuriní words', Tupi Studies I, ed. by D. Bendor-Samuel, 21-74 (Norman, 1971)— where, among other things, he will learn that the symbol q, which H uses in his examples but does not list as a phoneme, represents [kwJ. However, general linguists should find Asuriní worth learning about, if for no other reason than that H reports the basic wordorder of the language to be OVS, e.g. in the following : cane-A cene-Necatf -(po)ta(N) aPe-A ushe/us-see-FUThe = canee cenerecánta a?ee 'He will see us' (p. 18; -A is a general noun ending). This example certainly suggests some of the morphophonemic complexity that H has had to deal with in Asuriní. Unfortunately, however , he has chosen to cite most data not in underlying and surface forms (as above), but only in the underlying form. This makes it next to impossible to use this grammar as a source for illustrative examples, unless one is willing to work through the morphophonemic rules each time. A possibly more serious problem is that most of H's examples are not complete sentences (or even, in the spirit of this particular grammar, complete paragraphs or discourses), but simply isolated phrases or clauses illustrating points under discussion. Again, this makes the grammar hard to exploit as a source of data. I found the most exciting thing about Asuriní to be the four sets of pronominal prefixes used on verbs, postpositions, and possessed nouns. One is for ordinary possessors (pp. 119-20), objects of the verbs of certain subordinate clauses and of postpositions (93, 97, 105, 116-17), subjects of certain intransitive subordinate clauses (94-6), and subjects of 'descritor' (adjectival) verbs (106); another is for intransitive subjects of another group ofsubordinate clauses (98, 107), and for reflexive possessors and reflexive and reciprocal objects of postpositions (113, 115, 118); a third is for the subjects of intransitive main verbs (111), and of reflexive and reciprocal verbs (101-3); and the final set (which includes the prefix cene- in the example above) marks both the subject and the object of transitive main verbs (108-11). Figuring out how these complex systems developed and showing their relationship to the basic grammatical structure of the language would be a fascinating study, one which I hope H has already begun (he states on p. 11 that prefix agreement is one of the two most interesting things about Asuriní). But a piecemeal transformational approach is not the way to bring out such connections: note the number of different page citations required to list all the uses of the prefixes above (nowhere does H comment on the multiplicity of uses of the first three sets, or on how those uses might be related). This, then, is the major problem with this work: the transformational framework obscures H's presentation of his clearly well- ...