New German Original very decorative leather bdg. 4to. (29 x 25 cm). In German and Persian. [xxxii], 1999; [xiii], 287, [35] p. Altiranisches Wörterbuch: Zusammen mit Zum altiranichen Wörterbuch. Nacharbeiten und Vorarbeiten. Beiheft zum XIX. Band der 'Indogermanischen Forschungen' herausgegeben von Karl Brugmann und Wilhelm Streitberg. Mit einem persischen Vorwort von Badr al-Zaman Gharib. Bartholomæ was a German scholar of Iranian and Indo-European studies. Bartholomae devoted the main part of his life and work to Iranian linguistics, his chief endeavor being directed toward the integration of Iranian into the framework of Indo-European languages. With great energy and endurance he met the challenge of the Old Iranian texts, both the Avesta and the Old Persian inscriptions, breaking new ground in the linguistic investigation of these texts, establishing their phonological development and morphological structure. Bartholomae was strongly conscious of the need for combining the indigenous Indian Parsi tradition with both classical Western philological methods and those of comparative linguistics in the interpretation of the Avestan texts and in this way did much to relieve the pressure on Zoroastrian studies to base themselves exclusively upon the Zoroastrian tradition. The progress of Iranian studies around the turn of the century, especially of Iranian linguistics, is thus most clearly reflected in Bartholomae's publications on Old Iranian, from Das altiranische Verbum (1878) to the Altiranisches Wörterbuch (1904) with its supplementary volume (1906). Bartholomae's first book, Das altiranische Verbum,was intended as the Iranian counterpart to several studies by Berthold Delbrück (mainly his Das altindische Verbum)and was therefore the first comprehensive presentation of the morphology and syntax of the Old Iranian verb to be written. In his Handbuch der altiranischen Dialekte (1883) he presented a more extensive and systematic comparative study of the phonology and morphology of the three old Indo-Iranian or Aryan languages (Avestan, Old Persian, and Old Indo-Aryan). The phonological part of this study, in which Iranian forms were derived from the original common Indo-Iranian forms, set a new standard for the linguistic analysis of both Indo-Iranian and Indo-European. What these two articles are to Old Iranian grammar, Bartholomae's Altiranisches Wörterbuch is to Old Iranian lexicography. Bartholomae spent over ten years compiling this work, which has been called "one of the best and most complete dictionaries written of any language" (M. J. Dresden), deservedly gaining the sobriquet of a chalkénteros.In it Bartholomae claimed to have collected and commented summarily on the entire Old Iranian linguistic material (both Avestan and Old Persian), as far as it was accessible in text editions. It was intended to replace F. Justi's Altbactrisches Wörterbuch (Leipzig, 1864), which had been the main source for Iranian lexicography, but had been made obsolete by K. F. Geldner's new edition of the Avesta (Stuttgart, 1885-95) and by the deeper understanding of the Pahlavi tradition achieved by scholars like M. Haug, E. W. West, and J. Darmesteter. Bartholomae added to the work of his predecessors by taking fully into consideration the tradition of the Parsi scholars, even where he regarded it as unreliable, and by supplementing Geldner's edition, which in fact contained fewer Avestan texts than N. L. Westergaard's Zendavesta (Copenhagen, 1854), by incorporating numerous smaller texts and fragments which were less accessible, sometimes even unpublished, and often had not yet been critically edited. Moreover, Bartholomae did not depend solely upon the text as edited by Geldner, but upon the manuscript tradition itself as given in Geldner's critical apparatus, which at times contains better readings than those printed in Geldner's text. On the whole the Wörterbuch is characterized by a felicitous combination of philological and linguisti
