On Alleged Anacolutha in Old Persian

Abstract

tribute to the clarity, conciseness, and completeness of Kent's Old Persian,1 which I found most helpful and useful in my task of acquiring sufficient knowledge of the language to use it for comparative purposes in my syntactical studies. But I cannot help feeling that the work is to some degree marred by a certain rigidity and inflexibility in dealing with aspects of the language which are not precisely what a logician, especially a logician steeped in classical Latin, might expect. Since Kent was unquestionably a linguist as well as a logician, this unwillingness to accept what a language does as what a language ought to do seems to me rather surprising. 2. One manifestation of this characteristic is the tendency to term as anacoluthon any construction that does not conform to the author's conception of the correct way to frame a sentence. Kent writes as follows (OP 99): Anacoluthon is the use of a grammatical element in a form which does not find its justification in the remainder of the sentence. This occurs in OP in connection with ndma-phrases (? 312), with genealogies (? 313), with relative clauses, and occasionally elsewhere. 3. The genealogies as discussed by Kent in ? 313 (OP 98-9)-that is, the genealogies of the late kings Artaxerxes I, II, and III-are indeed troublesome. In my opinion the language of the earlier kings, notably Darius and Xerxes, is on the whole, despite Kent's occasional strictures, clear and precise; 2 but by the time of the three kings named Artaxerxes, especially the last one, something peculiar has happened to the language, or at least to those users of it, whether the kings in question or their ghost-writers, who composed the 1 Roland G. Kent, Old Persian (New Haven, 1950), referred to hereinafter as Kent, OP, or simply as Kent. Other bibliographical data are to be interpreted as follows. AMII=Archaeologische Mitteilungen aus Iran. BB = Beitrage zur kunde der indogermanischen sprachen. Benveniste =A. Meillet, Grammaire du vieux-perse, 2nd edition, corrected and enlarged by E. Benveniste (Paris, 1931). Brugmann, Grund. = Karl Brugmann, Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, vols. 1-2, 2nd edition (Strassburg, 1897-1916). BSL = Bulletin de la Socigtd de Linguistique de Paris. BSOAS =Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London). Buck = Carl Darling Buck, Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin, 4th impression (Chicago, 1948). Buck, OU = Id., A Grammar of Oscan and Umbrian (Boston, 1904). Curme Vol. = Curme Volume of Linguistic Studies, edited by James Taft Hatfield, Werner Leopold, and A. J. Friedrich Zieglschmid =-Language Monograph No. 7 (Philadelphia, no date; opening sketch dated 1930). Delbrftck, VS = B. Delbrtick, Vergleichende Syntax der indogermanischen Sprachen, parts 1-3 = Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, vols. 3-5 (Strassburg, 1893-1900). Friedrich, El. = Johannes Friedrich, Hethitisches Elementarbuch, 2 parts (Heidelberg, 1940-1946). IF = Indogermanische Forschungen. JAOS = Journal of the American Oriental Society. Johnson = Edwin Lee Johnson, Historical Grammar of the Ancient Persian Language (New York, 1917). LeumannHofmann = Manu Leumann and Joh. Bapt. Hofmann, Stolz-Schmalz Lateinische Grammatik, 5th edition (Munich, 1928). Lg. = Language. Lbfstedt = Einar L6fstedt, Philologischer Kommentar zur Peregrinatio Aetheriae (Uppsala, 1911). Meillet= A. Meillet, Grammaire du vieux perse (Paris, 1915). Meillet-Vendryes = A. Meillet and J. Vendryes, Traite de grammaire compar6e des langues classiques, 2nd edition (Paris, 1927). Monro = D. B. Monro, A Grammar of the Homeric Dialect, 2nd edition (Oxford, 1891). SF = Syntaktische Forschungen, edited by B. Delbriick and (vols. 1-3) E. Windisch, 5 vols. (Halle, 1871-1888). TAPA = Transactions of the American Philological Association. Walde-Hofmann = A. Walde, Lateinisches etymologisches Wbrterbuch, 3rd edition, revised by J. B. Hofmann, 2 vols. (Heidelberg, 1938-). Walde-Pokorny = Alois Walde, Vergleichendes Wbrterbuch der indogermanischen Sprachen, edited and revised by Julius Pokorny, 3 vols. (Berlin and Leipzig, 1927-1932). Whitney = William Dwight Whitney, Sanskrit Grammar, 2nd edition, 5th issue (Cambridge, 1923). WZKM = Wiener Zeitschrif t fuir die Kunde des Morgenlandes. ZDMG = Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft. References are to pages unless otherwise indicated. In quotations from foreign languages, enough is given to show the sense and the syntax, but words irrelevant to the present discussion may be omitted, without any indication of such omission. 2 I am glad to have this opinion of mine confirmed by so great an authority as Meillet, who speaks of their inscriptions (19) as redigees dans une langue coherente et manifestement correcte. This is retained verbatim in the second edition (24) prepared by a second eminent scholar, Benveniste.