Text correction: A non-wholistic study (a discussion on the issue of rarities)

In this article, by enumerating the various kinds of rare lexical items in the old Persian texts, attempts are made to examine the causes and motivations for the use of such items and thus offer some criteria for identifying them. These criteria must, on the one hand, discourage editors from removing rare words and syntactic forms from texts, and, on the other, prevent them from fabricating inauthentic words simply on account of obscurities in the old texts. The author claims that the use of rarities in texts is basically entailed by certain conditions and necessities which must be discovered by editors. To this end, they are required to deem the principles of correcting texts and old manuscripts as the most credible sources and avoid subjective arbitrary judgement as much as possible.