Zend Avesta Part 03

SR No.: 007673
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: L H Mills
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1887
Total Pages: 2618
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 49 MB

Page 519

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
liii
occasionally the very mistakes against which they are warned by the Prâtisâkhya. Thus the Prâtisâkhya (Sûtra 799) warns the students against a common mistake of changing vaiyasva into vayyasva, i. e. by changing ai to a, and doubling the semivowel y. But this very mistake occurs in S2, and another MS. gives vaiyyasva. See P. lvi.
mistakes.
If these arguments are sound, and if nothing can be said against the critical principles by which I have been guided Aufrecht's in editing the text of the Rig-veda, if the fourfold check, described above, fulfils every requirement that could be made for restoring that text which was known to Sâyana, and which was known, probably 2000 years earlier, to the authors of the Prâtisâkhyas, what can be the motives, it may fairly be asked, of those who clamour for a new and more critical edition, and who imagine that the editio princeps of the Rig-veda will share the fate of most of the editiones principes of the Greek and Roman classics, and be supplanted by new editions founded on the collation of other MSS.? No one could have rejoiced more sincerely than I did at the publication of the Romanised transliteration of the Rig-veda, carried out with so much patience and accuracy by Professor Aufrecht. It showed that there was a growing interest in this, the only true Veda; it showed that even those who could not read Sanskrit in the original Devanâgari, wished to have access to the original text of these ancient hymns; it showed that the study of the Veda had a future before it like no other book of Sanskrit literature. My learned friend Professor Aufrecht has been most unfairly charged with having printed this Romanised text me insciente vel invito. My edition is publici juris, like any edition of Homer or Plato, and anybody might, with proper acknowledgment, have reprinted it, either in Roman or Devanâgarî letters. But far from keeping me in ignorance of his plan, Professor Aufrecht applied to me for the loan of the MSS. of the two Mandalas which I had not yet published, and I lent them to him most gladly, because, by seeing them printed at once, I felt far less
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