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Indo-Iranian Literary & Cultural Traditions
In the above translation the two opening words kada yavă are taken together to mean 'when, if ever', yavā is interpreted as instr. sg. of yay 'Dauer, used as an adverb.16 But this seems to be the only place where kadā and yavá arc used together. Humbach" asks us to compare kada yavå hvo anhat with yadā hvo anhat occurring in Yasna 31-16. But this will show that in our passage we should construe only kada with hyo anhat “when will he be ?" The remaining word yava, then, can be interpreted as nom. sg. of yavan, yvan, 'young man, young hero' which is attested in the younger Avesta. The line cited above will thus mean: 'When will that young man be who will give us help with his hands ?" This meaning will suit the context because the Ox-Soul is asking for a powerful man with physical strength as his guardian. If this interpretation is correct, the word yavayoung man' will indicate that the prophet had become old when the Gatha was composed and that he had till then not succeeded in persuading the people to accept the change in the religion as preached by him.
Now we are ready to face some other questions before we can admit usira 'protector of the ox' as a compound of uxsan and a form from the verb tră. Such a compound normally should have been uxsathra, and the prophet's name, then, would bave been Zarathuxsathra, 17 First, we will look to the disappearance of * before s in usan for uxsan and in this regard note that a few possible examples of the disappearance of x before s have been recorded. E.g. we get avasata 'he spoke' for *avaxsata<*a-vak-sa-la." Bartholomae'' thinks it possible that x before s bas been lost in the form visano (Acc. pl. of visan) < *vixsånd (visan<vis + Vhan, Sk. vis+ san). But it is still more important to note that Gershevitcha' has cited a Zoroastrian Middle Persian form zarduxst which shows the presence of x before s. Gershevitch tries to explain this away as due to dissimilation, the form zarduxst having to be derived from *zardurst. But the Middle Persian form will rather show that in Old Iranian there existed a form *zarad.uxsıra as the prophet's name, besides zarathustra which is attested in the Avesta. *uxstra will then lend support to our explanation of the effected ustra from *uxstra.
The loss of the final vowel with the following nasal of u(x)san, when it occurs as the first member of the compound us.tra, is more difficult to explain. of course, one may point out that Stammverstümlung in Vorderglied 21 does in general occur. And in particular, one may note that the final vowel with the following consonant of the first member of a compound is indecd considered to have been lost in a few examples by commentators on Sanskrit grammatical works. 2 These examples are patañjali<patai + añjali, manisa..manas+isa and simanta<simant anta.
NOTES
1 Trans. Phil. Soc., 1953.40. 2 Altiranisches Wörterbuch, 1676. 3 One can find there one more explanation by Haug himself and various earlier explanations
Madhu Vidyā/198
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