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VI. ERPATISTÂN AND NÍRANGISTÂN.
303
at Bombay to deliver a lecture on the Parsi literature, I took advantage of the approaching Jubilee of the Queen to recommend the creation of a Victoria Jubilee Fund for the publication of the unedited Pahlavi literature. The appeal was readily answered, a fund raised, and it was decided that the publication should begin with the Nirangistân. Unfortunately, in the realisation of the plan, the scientific experience of the young Parsi school did not prove quite equal to its good will. Instead of printing from the better manuscript, with the various readings of the inferior one in foot-notes, the committee for publication had the less good manuscript photozincographed. We have not yet in hand the Jubilee edition, but may hope that at least the variants of Tahmuras' manuscript have been annexed to it. We have thought it advisable, meanwhile, to give here for the use of scholars the Zend text, of which only a few manuscript copies are extant in Europe'.
1 We have already published it in our French Avesta, but that edition is too scarce and too expensive to be of general use. The text given represents essentially Tahmuras' copy, corrected here and there from Hoshangji's manuscript. The barbarous forms are many, and a considerable number of them might be easily corrected: however, whenever they did not make the meaning more obscure, we thought it better to let them stand as they were, because in the degenerate stage in which the Zend language presents itself to us, there is no uniform standard from which one may view and to which one may reduce the erring forms.
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| SR No. | 007671 |
| Book Title | Zend Avesta Part 01 |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | James Darmesteter |
| Publisher | Oxford |
| Publication Year | 1895 |
| Total Pages | 2695 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 49 MB |