Avestan

Avestan (/əˈvɛstən/ ə-VESS-tən) is the liturgical language of Zoroastrianism. It belongs to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family and was originally spoken during the Avestan period (c. 1500 – 400 BCE) by the Iranians living in eastern Greater Iran as evidenced from names in Avestan geography.

After Avestan became extinct, its religious texts were transmitted orally, then collected and put into writing during the Sasanian period (c. 400 – 500 CE). The extant material falls into two groups: Old Avestan (c. 1500 – 900 BCE) and Younger Avestan (c. 900 – 400 BCE). The immediate ancestor of Old Avestan was the Proto-Iranian language, a sister language to the Proto-Indo-Aryan language, with both having developed from the earlier Proto-Indo-Iranian language. As such, Old Avestan is quite close in both grammar and lexicon to Vedic Sanskrit, the oldest preserved Indo-Aryan language.

The Avestan texts consistently use the term Arya, i.e., Iranian, for the speakers of Avestan. The same term also appears in ancient Persian and Greek sources as an umbrella term for Iranian languages. Despite this, the Avestan texts never use Arya, or any other term, specifically in reference to the language itself, and its native name therefore remains unknown.

The modern name Avestan is instead derived from the Avesta, which is the name of the written collection of the Avestan texts. This collection was created during the Sasanian period to complement the, up to then, purely oral tradition. Like Vedic, Avestan is therefore a language which is named after the text corpus in which it is used and simply means language of the Avesta. The name Avesta comes from Persian اوستا (avestâ) itself derived from Middle Persian abestāg. It might originate from a hypothetical Avestan term *upastāvakacode: ave promoted to code: ae (praise song). The language was sometimes called Zend in older works, stemming from a misunderstanding of the Zend (commentaries and interpretations of Zoroastrian scripture) as synonymous with the Avesta itself, due to both often being bundled together as Zend-Avesta.

Avestan is usually grouped into two variants: Old Avestan, also known as Gathic Avestan, and Young Avestan. More recently, some scholars have argued for a third intermediate stage called Middle Avestan, but this is not yet universally followed. Old Avestan is much more archaic than Young Avestan, especially in terms of its morphology. It is assumed that the two are separated by several centuries. In addition, Old Avestan differs dialectally, i.e. it is not the direct predecessor of Young Avestan but a closely related dialect. Despite these differences, Old and Young Avestan are usually interpreted as two different variants of the same language instead of two different languages.

Avestan is an Old Iranian language and, together with Old Persian, one of the two languages from that period for which longer texts are available. Other known Old Iranian languages, like Median and early Scythian, are only known from isolated words and personal names. Young Avestan shows morphological and syntactical similarities with Old Persian, which may indicate that both were spoken around the same time. On the other hand, Old Avestan is substantially more archaic than either of these and largely agrees morphologically with Vedic Sanskrit, i.e., the oldest known Indo-Aryan language. This suggests that only a limited period of time has elapsed since the two separated from their common Indo-Iranian ancestor.

Scholars traditionally classify Iranian languages as Eastern or Western according to certain grammatical features, and within this framework Avestan is sometimes classified as Eastern Old Iranian. However, as for instance Sims-Williams and Schmitt have pointed out, the east–west distinction is of limited meaning for Avestan, as the linguistic developments that later distinguish Eastern from Western Iranian had not yet occurred. Due to some shared developments with Median, Scholars like Skjaervo and Windfuhr have classified Avestan as a Central Iranian language.

The Avestan language is only known from the Avesta and is otherwise unattested. As a result, there is no external evidence on which to base the time frame during which the Avestan language was natively spoken and all attempts have to rely on internal evidence. Such attempts were often linked to the life of Zarathustra, being the central figure of Zoroastrianism. Zarathustra was traditionally based in the 6th century BCE meaning that Old Avestan would have been spoken during the early Achaemenid period. Given that a substantial time must have passed between Old Avestan and Young Avestan, the latter would have been spoken somewhere during the Hellenistic or the Parthian period of Iranian history.