Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Side 150

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LE NORD
tributed to the discussion of Ossetic problems, and N. Reuter
to the interpretation of Saka literature.
In the field of the latter language, Norway has also made an
important contribution to Iranian studies. Saka is known from
Buddhist texts dating from the early middle ages, found in sand-
buried ruined cities in the Khotan district of Eastern Turkestan.
They are written in an Indian alphabet which designates the
vowels in full, in contradistinction to the more or less imperfect
alphabets of Semitic origin in which most other Iranian languages
were written down. The indologist, Sten Konow, was the first
to see that this was a purely Iranian language, and not an inter-
mediary language between Indian and Iranian. In a long series
of treatises he has worked successfully on the linguistic and
philological interpretation of these texts, which have added a
new province to linguistic science. Saka is especially interest-
ing because it represents a very distinctive branch of Iranian
which is now extinct, and because it preserves more of the inflec-
tion than the other Middle Iranian languages. Recently, Konow
has introduced Saka to a wider circle of linguists by the publicat-
ion of his “Khotansakische Grammatik,” a text-book with
selected specimens of the language and a glossary. It is to be
hoped that this book will contribute towards giving the study
of Saka the place it deserves within the field of Iranology.
Konow has shown that the language of a few manuscript pages
with partly unknown characters, found in a more Northerly part
of Eastern Turkestan, represents a different Saka dialect, and he
has deciphered and to a large extent interpreted these documents
with great acumen. In other cases too, he has worked in the
border sphere between Iranian and Indian, thus e. g. in his study
of the Aryan divinities apostrophized by a Mittanni King in the
Near East about 1400 b. C.
G. Morgenstierne has especially dealt with Modern Iranian
languages, among them again especially the languages of the Indian
border. Among other things, he has published an etymological
vocabulary of Afghan, a language distinguished by a highly
archaic vocabulary, and other etymological studies as well. Dur-
ing his travels in Afghanistan and the Hindukush he has col-
lected linguistic material from hitherto unknown Iranian “relic
languages,” which he has subsequently studied with the special
object of showing mutual Indo-Iranian influences. He has also
taken up the problems of the orthography and phonology of