Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Side 142

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LE NORD
We now know that this claim was substantially correct: the
Avesta is the most original extant source of the Zarathustran
religion, and portions of it certainly go back to the Founder
himself. But the great discovery of the French scholar was at
first met with profound scepticism, indeed with derision, on the
part of many of the leading orientalists of the time, an attitude
to which his own errors and his not always tenable hypotheses
contributed in some measure. As late as 1810 W. Erskine
published a paper in which he denied the authenticity of the
Avesta: its language was, he maintained, only a debased form
of Sanscrit used by the Parsees of India in their religious books,
and not an Iranian language at all.
Erskine’s paper was the starting point which Rask chose for
his treatment of the problem. His arguments are partly historical,
partly, and principally, linguistic. He demonstrates clearly and
convincingly that the phonetic system of the Avesta shows a
closer correspondance with Iranian than with Sanscrit; that
though the inflection is similar to that of Sanscrit it presents
several features which accord rather with Greek and Latin, and
which cannot possibly have originated or been invented in India;
that the little that was known of the Old Persian inscriptions at
the time pointed towards a close relationship between the latter
and Avestan; that many Avestan words are still found in Persian
and other modern Iranian languages, and especially that the
religious terminology of the later forms of Parsism is clearly
derived from the Avesta. He realizes, however, that the Avesta
is not in its entirety the work of Zarathustra himself, but he
maintains that it must, on the whole, go back to a time earlier
than that of Alexander the Great. After Rask’s paper, all doubts
about the authenticity of the Avesta ceased, and all subsequent
research into its contents and language, a sister language of
Sanscrit, builds on the firm foundations thus laid by the Danish
scholar.
The knowledge of the Iranian languages which Rask had
acquired during his Eastern travels he also utilized to give the
first survey of them and their mutual relationships. This account
is incomplete, as was only to be expected, but it is substantially
correct. During his sojourn in the Caucasus, Rask formed the
intention of studying the Iranian language known as Ossetic
which is spoken among the mountains there. Other projects, how-
ever, prevented the realization of this plan. After his return to