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The Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies
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PAHLAVI LANGUAGE
(Parthian & Sasanian Pahlavi)
Parthian Pahlavi:
One of Western Iranian languages, Parthian used to be a state language in Parthia, together with Persian and Greek. Before the Parthian Empire was ruled by Arsacids dynasty, Parthian was only a tongue spoken in the small region, but later it spread to all Iran, Armenia, was used in Central Asia. It was spoken widely even in Sasanid Empire, until the 6th century AD.
There are three pairs of vowel phonemes in Parthian - long and short a, i, u, and two single long vowels e, o which appeared from ancient diphthongs. Consonant mutations included the following: *z, *d > z, *dv > b and some others. The grammar structure can be characterized by analytism: ancient categories of gender and case were lost in noun declension, final endings of verbs were replaced by analytic construction using the ancient participle in -ta-. However, in early inscriptions indirect cases and verb inflections can be somehow seen.
Parthian script was a descendant of Aramaic alphabets. The oldest documents found include the economic documents from Nisa (1st century BC). They are written in Parthian script with additions of ideograms, as well as rock inscriptions dating back to the 3rd century AD.
Sasanian Pahlavi:
The language of the Sasanian Empire (AD 224-641) was Middle Persian, often called Pahlavi (a term more strictly reserved for a form of the language used in certain Zoroastrian writings). Middle Persian has a simpler grammar than Old Persian and was usually written in an ambiguous script with multivalent letters, adopted from Aramaic; it declined after the Arab conquest in the 7th century. Although much of the Middle Persian literature was translated into Arabic, the bulk of its writings was lost during Islamic times. In Middle Persian times phonetics changes greatly: e.g., Indo-European g'h which became z in Old Persian now turned into d; s > h, kw > sp > s , etc. Much influence it suffered from Parthian and other neighbor languages, and certainly from Arabic. The morphology now becomes completely analytic, loses genders and cases, many verbal forms.
Links to other Relevant Websites
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Link to: A Concise Pahlavi Dictionary Online; At present the Lexicon of Iranian Languages contains Professor MacKenzie's Pahlavi-English Dictionary with approx. 4200 entries. You can either search for one of the Pahlavi entries under Pahlavi or under English for a translation, grammatical or other information listed in the CPD. |
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Link to: Pahlavi Fonts; Fonts Developed in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota, by William W. Malandra and Emily B. West. |
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"History is the Light on the Path to Future" |
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Encyclopaedia Iranica
The British Institute of Persian Studies "Persepolis Reconstructed"
The British Museum
The Royal Asiatic Society
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