The Avesta: A Lexico-Statistical Analysis

The computer has become today a ubiquitous tool which has been deployed in all areas of research. However with very few exceptions, there have not been many applications to classical scripts, especial those treating of liturgical data. This is paradoxical: these texts lend themselves much easier to analysis, since in a majority of cases, the corpus is well-documented and to a certain extent also limited and well-defined; especially in the case of the Avesta.

It is this lacuna that this book tries to fill by providing the student as well as scholars working in the field of the Avesta, indexes, hapax legomena as well as frequency counts. These, it is hoped, will be of certain utility by not only reducing the amount of time looking up for a particular word and its recensions, but by also allowing researchers to break new ground in Avestan studies with the help of the distributional analyses provided. The data, based on the Geldnerian version of the Avesta, has been generated by computer and has subsequently been validated and verified manually.