Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/151

P A H L A Y I 135 a noun was written in its status absolutus, sometimes the emphatic a was added, and this was sometimes written as X sometimes as n. One verb was written in the perfect, another in the imperfect. Even various dialects were laid under contribution. The Semitic signs by which Persian synonyms were distinguished are sometimes quite arbitrary. Thus in Persian khwesh and khwat both mean "self"; the former is written NFshn (nafshd or nafshefi), the latter BNFslm with the preposition be prefixed. Personal pro nouns are. expressed in the dative (i.e., with prepositional I prefixed), thus LK (lakh) for tu, " thou," LNH (land) for amd, "we." Sometimes the same Semitic sign stands for two distinct Persian words that happen to agree in sound; thus because hand is Aramaic for " this," HNA represents not only Persian e, " this," but also the interjection e, i.e., " 0" as prefixed to a vocative. Sometimes for clearness a Persian termination is added to a Semitic word ; thus, to distinguish between the two words for father, pit and pitar, the former is written AB and the latter ABITR. The Persian form is, however, not seldom used, even where there is a quite well-known Semitic ideogram. 1 These difficulties of reading mostly disappear when the ideographic nature of the writing is recognized. We do not always know what Semitic word supplied some ambiguous group of letters (e.g., PUN f or pa, "to," or HT for agar, " if ") ; but we always can tell the Persian word which is the one important thing though not always the exact pronunciation of it in that older stage of the language which the extant Pahlavi works belong to. In Pahlavi, for example, the word for "female" is written mdtak, an ancient form which afterwards passed through mddhak into mddha. But it was a mistake of later ages to fancy that because this was so the sign T also meant D, and so to write T for D in many cases, especially in foreign proper names. That a word is written in an older form than that which is pronounced is a phenomenon common to many languages whose literature covers a long period. So in English we still write though we do not pronounce the gutteral in through, and write laugh when we pronounce laf. Much graver difficulties arise from the cursive nature of the characters already alluded to. There are some groups which may theoretically be read in hundreds of ways ; the same little sign may be w, 50, iT 1 , in, m, 5O, HJ, and the n too may be either h or kh. In older times there was still some little distinction between letters that are now quite identical in form, but even the fragments of Pahlavi writing of the 7th century recently found in Egypt show on the whole the same type as our MSS. The practical inconveniences to those who knew the language were not so great as they may seem ; the Arabs also long used an equally ambiguous character without availing themselves of the diacritical points which had been devised long before. Modern MSS., following Arabic models, introduce dia critical points from time to time, and often incorrectly. These give little help, however, in comparison with the so-called Pazand or transcription of Pahlavi texts, as they are to be spoken, in the character in which the Avestd itself is written, and which is quite clear and has all vowels as well as consonants. The transcription is not philologically accurate ; the language is often modernized, but not uniformly so. Pazand MSS. present dialectical variations according to the taste or intelligence of authors and copyists, and all have many false readings. For us, however, they are of the greatest use. To get a concep tion of Pahlavi one cannot do better than read the Minoi- Khiradh in the Pahlavi with constant reference to the 1 For examples of various peculiarities see the notes to Noldeke s translation of the story of Artachshir i Papakdn, Gottingen, 1879. Pazand. 2 Critical labour is still required to give an approximate reproduction of the author s own pronuncia tion of what he wrote. The coins of the later Sasanian kings, of the princes of Tabaristan, and of some governors in the earlier Arab period exhibit an alphabet very similar to Pahlavi MSS. On the older coins the several letters are more clearly distinguished, and in good specimens of well-struck coins of the oldest Sasanians almost every letter can be re cognized with certainty. The same holds good for the inscriptions on gems and other small monuments of the early Sasanian period ; but the clearest of all are the rock inscriptions of the Sasanians in the 3d and 4th centuries, though in the 4th century a tendency to cursive forms begins to appear. Only r and v are always quite alike. The character of the language and the system of writing is essentially the same on coins, gems, and rocks as in MSS. pure Persian, in part strangely dis guised in a Semitic garb. In details there are many differences between the Pahlavi of inscriptions and the books. Persian endings added to words written in Semitic form are much less common in the former, so that the person and number of a verb are often not to be made out. There are also orthographic variations ; e.g., long a in Persian forms is always expressed in book-Pahlavi, but not always in inscriptions. The unfamiliar contents of some of these inscriptions, their limited number, their bad preservation, and the imperfect way in which some of the most important of them have been published 3 leave many things still obscure in these monuments of Persian kings ; but they have done much to clear up both great and small points in the history of Pahlavi. 4 Some of the oldest Sasanian inscriptions are accompanied by a text belonging to the same system of writing, but with many variations in detail, 5 and an alphabet which, though derived from the same source with the other Pahlavi alphabets (the old Aramaic), has quite different forms. This character is also found on some gems and seals. It has been called Chaldaso-Pahlavi, &c. Olshausen tries to make it probable that this was the writing of Media and the other that of Persia. The Persian dialect in both sets of inscriptions is identical or nearly so. 6 The name Pahlavi means Parthian, Pahlav being the regular Persian transformation of the older Parthava. 7 This fact points to the conclusion that the system of writing was developed in Parthian times, when the great nobles, the Pahlavans, ruled, and Media was their main seat, "the Pahlav country." Other linguistic, graphical, and historical indications point the same way ; but it is still far from clear how the system was developed. We know indeed that even under the Acha3menians Aramaic writing and speech were employed far beyond the Aramaic lands even in official documents and on coins. The Eranians had no convenient character, and might borrow 2 The bonk of the Mainyo-i-Khard in the original Pahlavi, ed. by Fr. Ch. Andreas, Kiel, 1882 ; Id., The Pazand and Sanskrit Texts, by E. W. West, Stuttgart and London, 1871. West is the greatest living authority on Pahlavi. 3 See especially the great work of F. Stolze, Persepolis, 2 vols., Berlin, 1882. It was De Sacy who began the decipherment of the inscriptions. 4 Thus we now know that the ligature in book-Pahlavi which means " in," the original letters of which could not be made out, is for J*3, " between." It is to be read andar. s Thus/ws, " son," is written "HQ instead of il"l3 ; pesh, "before," is written iinOlp, but in the usual Pahlavi it is ^l?^^?. 6 What the Fihrist (p. ~[3 sq.} has about various forms of Persian writing certainly refers in part at least to the species of Pahlavi. But the statements are hardly all reliable, and in the lack of trustworthy specimens little can be made of them. 7 This was finally proved by Olshausen, following earlier scholars ; see J. Olshausen, Parthava und Pahlav, Mdda und Mah, Berlin, 1877 (and in the Monatsb. of the Academy).