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74-577: The Sogdian language is usually assigned to a Northeastern group of the Iranian languages . No direct evidence of an earlier version of the language ("Old Sogdian") has been found, although mention of the area in the Old Persian inscriptions means that a separate and recognisable Sogdia existed at least since the Achaemenid Empire (559–323 BCE). Like Khotanese, Sogdian may have possessed

148-679: A Syriac Psalter found at Bulayïq on the Silk Road , near Turpan in north-west China. It is in a more archaic script than Book Pahlavi . After the Muslim conquest of Persia , the Pahlavi script was gradually replaced by the Arabic script except in Zoroastrian sacred literature . The replacement of the Pahlavi script by the Arabic script to write Persian was done in the ninth-century by

222-522: A derivative of Proto-Indo-European language *ar-yo- , meaning "one who assembles (skilfully)". In the Iranic languages spoken on the plateau, the gentilic is attested as a self-identifier, included in ancient inscriptions and the literature of the Avesta , and remains also in other Iranian ethnic names Alan ( Ossetian : Ир Ir ) and Iron ( Ирон ). When used as a linguistic term Iranian

296-578: A more conservative grammar and morphology than Middle Persian. The modern Eastern Iranian language Yaghnobi is the descendant of a dialect of Sogdian spoken around the 8th century in Osrushana , a region to the south of Sogdia. During the period of the Chinese Tang dynasty (ca. 7th century CE), Sogdian was the lingua franca in Central Asia of the Silk Road , along which it amassed

370-618: A region to the south of Sogdia, developed into the Yaghnobi language and has survived into the 21st century. It is spoken by the Yaghnobi people . The first discovered Sogdian text was the Karabalgasun inscription , however, it was not understood until 1909 that it contained text in Sogdian. Aurel Stein discovered 5 letters written in Sogdian known as the "Ancient Letters" in an abandoned watchtower near Dunhuang in 1907, dating to

444-475: A rich vocabulary of loanwords such as tym ("hotel") from the Middle Chinese /tem/ ( Chinese : 店 ). The economic and political importance of Sogdian guaranteed its survival in the first few centuries after the Muslim conquest of Sogdia in the early eighth century. A dialect of Sogdian spoken around the 8th century in Osrushana (capital: Bunjikat, near present-day Istaravshan , Tajikistan),

518-459: A third-century inscription at Naqsh-e Rostam , with the accompanying Parthian inscription using the term Aryān , in reference to the Iranian peoples . The Middle-Iranian ērān and aryān are oblique plural forms of gentilic nouns ēr- (Middle Persian) and ary- (Parthian), both deriving from Proto-Iranian language *arya- (meaning " Aryan ", i.e. "of the Iranians"), recognized as

592-409: Is a smoother script in which letters are joined to each other and often form complicated ligatures . Book Pahlavi was the most common form of the script, with only 13 graphemes representing 24 sounds . The formal coalescence of originally different letters caused ambiguity, and the letters became even less distinct when they formed part of a ligature. In its later forms, attempts were made to improve

666-708: Is also called Zoroastrian Pahlavi or Zoroastrian Middle Persian . Tables showing the letters and their names or pronunciations are available online. Inscriptional Pahlavi and Inscriptional Parthian were added to the Unicode Standard in October 2009 with the release of version 5.2. Psalter Pahlavi was added in June 2014 with the release of version 7.0. There have been three main proposals for encoding Book Pahlavi, but as of October 2024 it remains unsupported by Unicode. The Unicode block for Inscriptional Pahlavi

740-587: Is also called Sassanid Pahlavi, Persian Pahlavi, or Southwest Pahlavi. It is between 1787 and 1791 that Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy deciphered the Pahlavi inscriptions of the Sassanid kings. Following the Islamic conquest of the Sassanids, the term Pahlavi came to refer to the (written) "language" of the southwest (i.e. Pārsi). How this came to pass remains unclear, but it has been assumed that this

814-443: Is applied to any language which descends from the ancestral Proto-Iranian language . Some scholars such as John R. Perry prefer the term Iranic as the anthropological name for the linguistic family and ethnic groups of this category, and Iranian for anything about the modern country of Iran . He uses the same analogue as in differentiating German from Germanic or differentiating Turkish and Turkic . This use of

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888-463: Is best attested in one of the three languages of the Behistun inscription, composed c.  520 BCE , and which is the last inscription (and only inscription of significant length) in which Old Persian is still grammatically correct. Later inscriptions are comparatively brief, and typically simply copies of words and phrases from earlier ones, often with grammatical errors, which suggests that by

962-472: Is correct, Parθava presumably became Pahlav through a semivowel glide rt (or in other cases rd ) change to l , a common occurrence in language evolution (e.g. sāl < sard, zāl < zard, gul < vard , sālār < sardar, mīlād < mihrdāt, etc.). The term has also been traced back to Avestan pərəthu- "broad [as the earth]", also evident in Sanskrit pṛthvi- "earth" and parthivi "[lord] of

1036-408: Is indistinguishable from effects due to other causes). In addition to Old Persian and Avestan, which are the only directly attested Old Iranian languages, all Middle Iranian languages must have had a predecessor "Old Iranian" form of that language, and thus can all be said to have had an (at least hypothetical) "Old" form. Such hypothetical Old Iranian languages include Old Parthian . Additionally,

1110-451: Is not known where that dialect (or dialects) was spoken either. Certain is only that Avestan (all forms) and Old Persian are distinct, and since Old Persian is "western", and Avestan was not Old Persian, Avestan acquired a default assignment to "eastern". Further confusing the issue is the introduction of a western Iranian substrate in later Avestan compositions and redactions undertaken at the centers of imperial power in western Iran (either in

1184-546: Is not one. It is an exclusively written system, but much Pahlavi literature remains essentially an oral literature committed to writing and so retains many of the characteristics of oral composition. The term Pahlavi is said to be derived from the Old Iranian word Parθava , meaning Parthia , a region just east of the Caspian Sea , with the -i suffix denoting the language and people of that region. If this etymology

1258-581: Is only "Eastern Iranian" in the sense that it is not Western. The Iranian languages all descend from a common ancestor: Proto-Iranian , which itself evolved from Proto-Indo-Iranian . This ancestor language is speculated to have origins in Central Asia , and the Andronovo culture of the Bronze Age is suggested as a candidate for the common Indo-Iranian culture around 2000 BCE. The language

1332-491: Is very archaic, and at roughly the same stage of development as Rigvedic Sanskrit . On the other hand, Younger Avestan is at about the same linguistic stage as Old Persian, but by virtue of its use as a sacred language retained its "old" characteristics long after the Old Iranian languages had yielded to their Middle Iranian stage. Unlike Old Persian, which has Middle Persian as its known successor, Avestan has no clearly identifiable Middle Iranian stage (the effect of Middle Iranian

1406-1126: The Achaemenid Empire ) and Old Avestan (the language of the Avesta ). Of the Middle Iranian languages, the better understood and recorded ones are Middle Persian (from the Sasanian Empire ), Parthian (from the Parthian Empire ), and Bactrian (from the Kushan and Hephthalite empires). As of 2000s , Ethnologue estimates that there are 86 languages in the group. Pontic Steppe Caucasus East Asia Eastern Europe Northern Europe Pontic Steppe Northern/Eastern Steppe Europe South Asia Steppe Europe Caucasus India Indo-Aryans Iranians East Asia Europe East Asia Europe Indo-Aryan Iranian Indo-Aryan Iranian Others European The term Iran derives directly from Middle Persian Ērān , first attested in

1480-774: The First World War . One of Gauthiot's most impressive articles was a glossary to the Sogdian text, which he was in the process of completing when he died. This work was continued by Émile Benveniste after Gauthiot's death. Various Sogdian pieces have been found in the Turfan text corpus by the German Turfan expeditions . These expeditions were controlled by the Ethnological Museum of Berlin . These pieces consist almost entirely of religious works by Manichaean and Christian writers, including translations of

1554-519: The Tahirid dynasty , the governors of Greater Khorasan . In the present day, "Pahlavi" is frequently identified with the prestige dialect of southwest Iran, formerly and properly called Fārsi , after Fars province . This practice can be dated to the period immediately following the Islamic conquest. The Pahlavi script is one of the two essential characteristics of the Pahlavi system (see above). Its origin and development occurred independently of

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1628-595: The Traditional Mongolian alphabet . As in other writing systems descended from the Proto-Sinaitic script , there are no special signs for vowels. As in the parent Aramaic system, the consonantal signs ’ y w can be used as matres lectionis for the long vowels [a: i: u:] respectively. However, unlike it, these consonant signs would also sometimes serve to express the short vowels (which could also sometimes be left unexpressed, as they always are in

1702-416: The variant for which the Pahlavi system was used, the written form of that language only qualifies as Pahlavi when it has the characteristics noted above. Pahlavi is then an admixture of: Pahlavi may thus be defined as a system of writing applied to (but not unique for) a specific language group, but with critical features alien to that language group. It has the characteristics of a distinct language, but

1776-600: The 3rd–6th-century Middle Persian language inscriptions of the Sasanian emperors and other notables. Genuine Middle Persian, as it appears in these inscriptions, was the Middle Iranian language of Persia proper, the region in the south-western corner of the Iranian plateau where the Sasanians had their power base. Inscriptional Pahlavi script had 19 characters which were not joined. Psalter Pahlavi derives its name from

1850-428: The 4th century BCE the transition from Old Persian to Middle Persian was already far advanced, but efforts were still being made to retain an "old" quality for official proclamations. The other directly attested Old Iranian dialects are the two forms of Avestan , which take their name from their use in the Avesta , the liturgical texts of indigenous Iranian religion that now goes by the name of Zoroastrianism but in

1924-711: The Arsacids. It is represented in some bilingual inscriptions alongside the Sasanian Pahlavi; by the parchment manuscripts of Auroman; and by certain Manichaean texts from Turpan . Furthermore, the archaic orthography of Sasanian Pahlavi continued to reflect, in many respects, pronunciations that had been used in Arsacid times (in Parthia as well as Fars) and not its contemporary pronunciation. Sasanian Pahlavi

1998-464: The Avesta itself is simply known as vohu daena (later: behdin ). The language of the Avesta is subdivided into two dialects, conventionally known as "Old (or 'Gathic') Avestan", and "Younger Avestan". These terms, which date to the 19th century, are slightly misleading since 'Younger Avestan' is not only much younger than 'Old Avestan', but also from a different geographic region. The Old Avestan dialect

2072-553: The Bible . Most of the Sogdian religious works are from the 9th and 10th centuries. Dunhuang and Turfan were the two most plentiful sites of Manichean, Buddhist, and Christian Sogdian texts. Sogdiana itself actually contained a much smaller collection of texts, discovered in the early 1930s near Mt. Mug in Tajikistan . These texts were business related, belonging to a minor Sogdian king, Divashtich . These business texts dated back to

2146-610: The Eastern category. The two languages of the Western group were linguistically very close to each other, but quite distinct from their eastern counterparts. On the other hand, the Eastern group was an areal entity whose languages retained some similarity to Avestan. They were inscribed in various Aramaic -derived alphabets which had ultimately evolved from the Achaemenid Imperial Aramaic script , though Bactrian

2220-548: The Parthian language. The script of these inscriptions is called inscriptional Parthian. Numerous clay fragments from Arsacid-era Parthia proper, in particular a large collection of fragments from Nisa that date to the reign of Mithridates I ( r. 171–138 BEC), are likewise inscribed in inscriptional Parthian. The bilingual and trilingual inscriptions of the 3rd-century Sasanian Empire include Parthian texts, which were then also rendered in inscriptional Parthian. The Parthian language

2294-561: The Sasanian had inherited the bureaucracy, in the beginning the affairs of government went on as before, with the use of dictionaries such as the Frahang ī Pahlavīg assisting the transition. More importantly, being both Western Middle Iranian languages , Parthian was closely related to the dialect of the southwest (which was more properly called Pārsīg , that is, the language of Pārsā , Persia proper). Arsacid Pahlavi did not die out with

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2368-446: The ancient speakers of Iranian languages. Of that variety of languages/dialects, direct evidence of only two has survived. These are: Indirectly attested Old Iranian languages are discussed below . Old Persian was an Old Iranian dialect as it was spoken in southwestern Iran (the modern-day province of Fars ) by the inhabitants of Parsa , Persia, or Persis who also gave their name to their region and language. Genuine Old Persian

2442-426: The characters of Book Pahlavi causes a high degree of ambiguity in most Pahlavi writing and it needs to be resolved by the context. Some mergers are restricted to particular groups of words or individual spellings. Further ambiguity is added by the fact that even outside of ligatures, the boundaries between letters are not clear, and many letters look identical to combinations of other letters. As an example, one may take

2516-483: The consonantary and reduce ambiguity through diacritic marks. Book Pahlavi continued to be in common use until about AD 900. After that date, Pahlavi was preserved only by the Zoroastrian clergy. In both Inscriptional and Book Pahlavi, many common words, including even pronouns, particles, numerals, and auxiliaries, were spelled according to their Aramaic equivalents, which were used as logograms. For example,

2590-431: The consonants had been debuccalized to ⟨h⟩ in the living language. The Pahlavi script consisted of two widely used forms: Inscriptional Pahlavi and Book Pahlavi. A third form, Psalter Pahlavi, is not widely attested. Although the Parthian Empire generally wrote in ancient Greek , some of the coins and seals of the Arsacid period (mid-3rd-century BCE to early 3rd century CE) also include inscriptions in

2664-448: The earth". The earliest attested use of Pahlavi dates to the reign of Arsaces I of Parthia (250 BCE) in early Parthian coin in Pahlavi scripts. There are also several Pahlavi texts written during the reign of Mithridates I ( r. 171–138 BCE). The cellars of the treasury at Mithradatkird near Nisa, Turkmenistan revealed thousands of pottery sherds with brief records; several ostraca that are fully dated bear references to members of

2738-535: The empire and its institutions, and with it the use of the Aramaic-derived language and script. Like the Parthians before him, Ardašēr , the founder of the Sasanian empire, projected himself as a successor to the regnal traditions of the first, in particular those of Artaxerxes II , whose throne name the new emperor adopted. From a linguistic point of view, there was probably only little disruption. Since

2812-643: The end of the Western Jin dynasty. The finding of manuscript fragments of the Sogdian language in China's Xinjiang region sparked the study of the Sogdian language. Robert Gauthiot , (the first Buddhist Sogdian scholar) and Paul Pelliot , (who while exploring in Dunhuang, retrieved Sogdian material) began investigating the Sogdian material that Pelliot had discovered in 1908. Gauthiot published many articles based on his work with Pelliot's material, but died during

2886-409: The existence of unattested languages can sometimes be inferred from the impact they had on neighbouring languages. Such transfer is known to have occurred for Old Persian, which has (what is called) a " Median " substrate in some of its vocabulary. Also, foreign references to languages can also provide a hint to the existence of otherwise unattested languages, for example through toponyms/ethnonyms or in

2960-462: The fact that the name of God, Ohrmazd , could equally be read (and, by Parsis , often was read) Anhoma . Historically speaking, it was spelt ⟨ʼwhrmzd⟩ , a fairly straightforward spelling for an abjad . However, ⟨w⟩ had coalesced with ⟨n⟩ ; ⟨r⟩ had coalesced, in the spelling of certain words, with both ⟨n⟩ and ⟨w⟩ ; and ⟨z⟩ had been reduced, in

3034-643: The far northwest; and the hypothetical "Old Parthian" (the Old Iranian ancestor of Parthian) in the near northwest, where original *dw > *b (paralleling the development of *ćw). What is known in Iranian linguistic history as the "Middle Iranian" era is thought to begin around the 4th century BCE lasting through the 9th century. Linguistically the Middle Iranian languages are conventionally classified into two main groups, Western and Eastern . The Western family includes Parthian ( Arsacid Pahlavi) and Middle Persian , while Bactrian , Sogdian , Khwarezmian , Saka , and Old Ossetic ( Scytho - Sarmatian ) fall under

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3108-458: The following branches: According to modern scholarship, the Avestan languages are not considered to fall under these categories, and are instead sometimes classified as Central Iranian, since they diverged from Proto-Iranian before the east-west division rose to prominence. It has traditionally been viewed as Eastern Iranian; however, it lacks a large number of Eastern Iranian features and thus

3182-447: The following simple vowels: Sogdian also has three rhotacized vowels: ə, i, u. The diphthongs in Sogdian are āi, āu, and those where the second element is a rhotacized vowel or a nasal element ṃ. Sogdian has two different sets of endings for so-called 'light' and 'heavy' stems. A stem is heavy if it contains at least one heavy syllable (containing a long vowel or diphthong); stems containing only light vowels are light. In heavy stems,

3256-552: The high incidence of logograms derived from Aramaic words, the Pahlavi script is far from always phonetic; and even when it is phonetic, it may have more than one transliterational symbol per sign, because certain originally different Aramaic letters have merged into identical graphic forms – especially in the Book Pahlavi variety. (For a review of the transliteration problems of Pahlavi, see Henning . ) In addition to this, during much of its later history, Pahlavi orthography

3330-441: The immediate family of the king. Such fragments, as well as the rock inscriptions of Sasanian emperors, which are datable to the 3rd and 4th centuries, do not qualify as a significant literary corpus. Although in theory Pahlavi could have been used to render any Middle Iranian language and hence may have been in use as early as 300 BC, no manuscripts that can be dated to before the 6th century have yet been found. Thus, when used for

3404-430: The inscriptions on a bronze processional cross found at Herat , in present-day Afghanistan. Due to the dearth of comparable material, some words and phrases in both sources remain undeciphered. Of the 18 characters, 9 connect in all four traditional abjad positions, while 9 connect only on their right or are isolated. Numbers are built from units of 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 20, and 100. The numbers 10 and 20 join on both sides, but

3478-421: The language of the chancellery. By the end of the Arsacid era, the written Aramaic words had come to be understood as logograms , as explained above. The use of Pahlavi gained popularity following its adoption as the language/script of the commentaries ( Zand ) on the Avesta . Propagated by the priesthood, who were not only considered to be transmitters of all knowledge but were also instrumental in government,

3552-520: The lexical form of the word in Aramaic, it could also come from a declined or conjugated Aramaic form. For example, tō "you" (singular) was spelt ⟨LK⟩ (Aramaic "to you", including the preposition l- ). A word could be written phonetically even when a logogram for it existed ( pidar could be ⟨ʼB-tr⟩ or ⟨pytr⟩ ), but logograms were nevertheless used very frequently in texts. Many uzwārišn are listed in

3626-477: The lexicon Frahang ī Pahlavīg . The practice of using these logograms appears to have originated from the use of Aramaic in the chancelleries of the Achaemenid Empire . Partly similar phenomena are found in the use of Sumerograms and Akkadograms in ancient Mesopotamia and the Hittite empire , and in the adaptation of Chinese writing to Japanese . As pointed out above, the convergence in form of many of

3700-435: The name of a literary genre, i.e. Middle Persian literature , the term refers to Middle Iranian, mostly Middle Persian , texts dated near or after the fall of the Sasanian Empire and (with exceptions) extending to about 900, after which Iranian languages enter the "modern" stage. The oldest surviving example of the Pahlavi literature is from fragments of the so-called " Pahlavi Psalter ", a 6th- or 7th-century translation of

3774-483: The numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 only join on the right, and if they are followed by an additional digit, they lose their tail, which is visually evident in their isolated forms. There are 12 encoded punctuation characters, and many are similar to those found in Syriac. The section marks are written in half-red and half-black, and several documents have entire sections in both black and red, as a means of distinction. Book Pahlavi

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3848-734: The occasional use of the term "Pahlavi" to refer to that language. Following the overthrow of the Seleucids , the Parthian Arsacids —who considered themselves the legitimate heirs of the Achaemenids —adopted the manner, customs and government of the Persian court of two centuries previously. Among the many practices so adopted was the use of the Aramaic language (" Imperial Aramaic ") that together with Aramaic script served as

3922-459: The parent systems). To distinguish long vowels from short ones, an additional aleph could be written before the sign denoting the long vowel. The Sogdian language also used the Manichaean alphabet , which consisted of 29 letters. In transcribing Sogdian script into Roman letters, Aramaic ideograms are often noted by means of capitals. The consonant inventory of Sogdian is as follows (parentheses mark allophones or marginal phonemes): Sogdian has

3996-496: The phonetically unambiguous Avestan alphabet . This latter system is called Pazand . From a formal historical and linguistic point of view, the Pahlavi script does not have a one-to-one correspondence with any Middle Iranian language: none was written in Pahlavi exclusively, and inversely, the Pahlavi script was used for more than one language. Still, the vast majority of surviving Pahlavi texts are in Middle Persian, hence

4070-581: The reconstructed linguistic relationships of common Indo-European. Proto-Iranian thus dates to some time after the Proto-Indo-Iranian breakup, or the early-2nd millennium BCE, as the Old Iranian languages began to break off and evolve separately as the various Iranian tribes migrated and settled in vast areas of southeastern Europe , the Iranian Plateau , and Central Asia. Proto-Iranian innovations compared to Proto-Indo-Iranian include:

4144-472: The recording of vocabulary, as Herodotus did for what he called " Scythian " and in one instance, Median ( σπάκα "dog"). Conventionally, Iranian languages are grouped into "western" and "eastern" branches. These terms have little meaning with respect to Old Avestan as that stage of the language may predate the settling of the Iranian peoples into western and eastern groups. The geographic terms also have little meaning when applied to Younger Avestan since it

4218-429: The so-called " Pahlavi Psalter ", a 6th- or 7th-century translation of a Syriac book of psalms. This text, which was found at Bulayiq near Turpan in northwest China, is the earliest evidence of literary composition in Pahlavi, dating to the 6th or 7th century AD. The extant manuscript dates no earlier than the mid-6th century since the translation reflects liturgical additions to the Syriac original by Mar Aba I , who

4292-550: The south-west in Persia, or in the north-west in Nisa/Parthia and Ecbatana/Media). Two of the earliest dialectal divisions among Iranian indeed happen to not follow the later division into Western and Eastern blocks. These concern the fate of the Proto-Indo-Iranian first-series palatal consonants, *ć and *dź: As a common intermediate stage, it is possible to reconstruct depalatalized affricates: *c, *dz. (This coincides with

4366-478: The spelling of certain words, to a form whose combination with ⟨d⟩ was indistinguishable from a ⟨ʼ⟩ , which in turn had coalesced with ⟨h⟩ . This meant that the same orthographic form that stood for ⟨ʼwhrmzd⟩ could also be interpreted as ⟨ʼnhwmh⟩ (among many other possible readings). The logograms could also pose problems. For this reason, important religious texts were sometimes transcribed into

4440-454: The state of affairs in the neighboring Nuristani languages .) A further complication however concerns the consonant clusters *ćw and *dźw: A division of Iranian languages in at least three groups during the Old Iranian period is thus implied: It is possible that other distinct dialect groups were already in existence during this period. Good candidates are the hypothetical ancestor languages of Alanian/Scytho-Sarmatian subgroup of Scythian in

4514-745: The stress falls on the stem, and in light stems, it falls on the suffix or ending. Iranian languages The Iranian languages , also called the Iranic languages , are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family that are spoken natively by the Iranian peoples , predominantly in the Iranian Plateau . The Iranian languages are grouped in three stages: Old Iranian (until 400 BCE), Middle Iranian (400 BCE – 900 CE) and New Iranian (since 900 CE). The two directly-attested Old Iranian languages are Old Persian (from

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4588-456: The term for the Iranian language family was introduced in 1836 by Christian Lassen . Robert Needham Cust used the term Irano-Aryan in 1878, and Orientalists such as George Abraham Grierson and Max Müller contrasted Irano-Aryan ( Iranian ) and Indo-Aryan ( Indic ). Some recent scholarship, primarily in German, has revived this convention. The Iranian languages are divided into

4662-571: The time of the Muslim conquest, about 700. Between 1996 and 2018, a number of inscribed fragments have been found at Kultobe in Kazakhstan . They date back to the Kangju culture, are significantly earlier than the 4th century A.D. and showcase an archaic state of Sogdian. In the years between 2003 and 2020, three new bilingual Chinese-Sogdian epitaphs have been discovered and published. Like all

4736-506: The turning of sibilant fricative *s into non-sibilant fricative glottal *h; the voiced aspirated plosives *bʰ, *dʰ, *gʰ yielding to the voiced unaspirated plosives *b, *d, *g resp.; the voiceless unaspirated stops *p, *t, *k before another consonant changing into fricatives *f, *θ, *x resp.; voiceless aspirated stops *pʰ, *tʰ, *kʰ turning into fricatives *f, *θ, *x, resp. The multitude of Middle Iranian languages and peoples indicate that great linguistic diversity must have existed among

4810-665: The use of Pahlavi eventually reached all corners of the Parthian Arsacid empire. Arsacid Pahlavi is also called Parthian Pahlavi (or just Parthian), Chaldeo-Pahlavi, or Northwest Pahlavi, the latter reflecting its apparent development from a dialect that was almost identical to that of the Medes. Following the defeat of the Parthian Arsacids by the Persian Sasanians ( Sassanids ), the latter inherited

4884-526: The various Middle Iranian languages for which it was used. The Pahlavi script is derived from the Aramaic script as it was used under the Sasanians , with modifications to support the phonology of the Iranian languages. It is essentially a typical abjad , where, in general, only long vowels are marked with matres lectionis (although short /i/ and /u/ are sometimes expressed so as well), and vowel-initial words are marked with an aleph . However, because of

4958-525: The word for "dog" was written as ⟨KLBʼ⟩ (Aramaic kalbā ) but pronounced sag ; and the word for "bread" would be written as Aramaic ⟨LḤMʼ⟩ ( laḥmā ) but understood as the sign for Iranian nān . These words were known as uzwārišn . Such a logogram could also be followed by letters expressing parts of the Persian word phonetically, e.g. ⟨ʼB-tr⟩ for pidar "father". The grammatical endings were usually written phonetically. A logogram did not necessarily originate from

5032-565: The writing systems employed for Middle Iranian languages, the Sogdian alphabet ultimately derives from the Aramaic alphabet . Like its close relatives, the Pahlavi scripts , written Sogdian contains many logograms or ideograms , which were Aramaic words written to represent native spoken ones. The Sogdian script is the direct ancestor of the Old Uyghur alphabet , itself the forerunner of

5106-609: Was Patriarch of the Church of the East c. 540–552. Its use is peculiar to Christians in Iran , given its use in a fragmentary manuscript of the Psalms of David. The script of the psalms has altogether 18 graphemes, 5 more than Book Pahlavi and one less than Inscriptional Pahlavi. As in Book Pahlavi, letters are connected to each other. The only other surviving source of Psalter Pahlavi are

5180-412: Was a Middle Iranian language of Parthia proper, a region in the north-western segment of the Iranian plateau where the Arsacids had their power base. Inscriptional Parthian script had 22 letters for sounds and 8 letters for numerals. The letters were not joined. Inscriptional Parthian has its own Unicode block . Inscriptional Pahlavi is the name given to a variant of the Pahlavi script as used to render

5254-406: Was characterized by historical or archaizing spellings. Most notably, it continued to reflect the pronunciation that preceded the widespread Iranian lenition processes, whereby postvocalic voiceless stops and affricates had become voiced, and voiced stops had become semivowels . Similarly, certain words continued to be spelt with postvocalic ⟨s⟩ and ⟨t⟩ even after

5328-540: Was simply because it was the dialect that the conquerors would have been most familiar with. As the language and script of religious and semi-religious commentaries, Pahlavi remained in use long after that language had been superseded (in general use) by Modern Persian and Arabic script had been adopted as the means to render it. As late as the 17th century, Zoroastrian priests in Iran admonished their Indian co-religionists to learn it. Post-conquest Pahlavi (or just Pahlavi)

5402-609: Was situated precisely in the western part of Central Asia that borders present-day Russia and Kazakhstan . It was thus in relative proximity to the other satem ethno-linguistic groups of the Indo-European family , such as Thracian , Balto-Slavic and others, and to common Indo-European's original homeland (more precisely, the Pontic-Caspian Steppe to the north of the Black Sea and the Caucasus ), according to

5476-458: Was written using an adapted Greek script . Pahlavi scripts Phli, 131  (Inscriptional Pahlavi) Phlp, 132  (Psalter Pahlavi) Pahlavi is a particular, exclusively written form of various Middle Iranian languages . The essential characteristics of Pahlavi are: Pahlavi compositions have been found for the dialects / ethnolects of Parthia , Persis , Sogdiana , Scythia , and Khotan . Independent of

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