With regard to the origin of the word Pahlavi, or lan- guage of Pahlav, many suggestions have been offered ; but the most probable explanation! is that which connects it with the Parthva of the cuneiform inscriptions, the land of the Parthians known to the Greeks and Romans, and of the Pahlavas mentioned by Sanskrit writers; the change of Parthva into Pahlav being very similar to that of Av. Mithra into Pers. Mihr. No doubt the language of the Parthians themselves was not Pahlavi, but they were the actual rulers of Persia for some centuries at the time when the Pahlavi language was forming there ; and, being formid- able to their neighbours, it is not surprising that their name became identified with everything Persian, in the same way as the Roman name has been applied by the Persians, not only to the later Greek empire of Constantinople, but even to the earlier conqueror, Alexander the Great.
Strictly speaking, the medizval Persian language is only called Pahlavi when it is written in one of the characters used before the invention of the modern Persian alphabet, and in the peculiarly enigmatical mode adopted in Pahlavi writings. Whenever it is transcribed, either in Avesta characters, or in those of the modern Persian alphabet, and freed from this peculiarity, it is called Pazand. ;
The peculiar mode of writing Pahlavi, here alluded to, long made the character of the language a standing puzzle for European scholars, and was first satisfactorily explained by Professor Haug, of Munich, in his admirable Essay on the Pahlavi Language already cited.
Like the Assyrians of old, the Persians of Parthian times appear to have borrowed their writing from a foreign race.
* See Haug’s Essay on the Pahlavi Language, Stuttgart, 1870; pp. 33-37.
INTRODUCTION. Xill
But, whereas the Semitic Assyrians adopted a Turanian sy labary, these later Aryan Persians accepted a Semitic alphabet. Besides the alphabet, however, which they could use for spelling their own words, they also transferred a certain number o: complete Semitic words to their writings, as ropresentatives of the corresponding words in their own language. These Semitic representatives (the number of which might at any time be increased or diminished at the discretion of the writer) were probably never very numerous, and not more than four hundred of them are to be found in the Pahlavi writings now extant; but, as they represent nearly all the commonest words in the language (excepting these specially relating to religious matters), they often constitute more than half the bulk of a Pahlavi text.
The use of such Semitic words, scattered about in Persian sentences, gives Pahlavi the motley appearance of a com- pound language; more especially as Persian terminations are often added to the Semitic words. But there are good reasons for supposing that the language was never spoken as it was written. The spoken language appears to have been purely Persian ; the Semitic words being merely used as written representatives, or logograms, of the Persian words which were spoken. Thus the Persians would write malkan malka, ‘king of kings,’ but they would read shahan shah. This is still the mode in which most Parsis read their Pahlavi literature; and it is only by assuming it to have been their universal practice, in former times, that we can account for the total and immediate disappearance of the Semitic portion of the Pahlavi, from their language, when the Persians adopted their modern alphabet. As the Semitic words were merely a Pahlavi mode of writing their Persian equivalents (just as ‘viz.’ is a mode of writing ‘namely’ in English), they disappeared with the Pahlavi writing, and the Persians began at once to write all their words, with their new alphabet, just as they pronounced them.
In the meantime, the greater part of the nation had
become Muhammadans, and a new influx of Semitic words
commenced, but of a very different character. The Semitic
XIV PAHLAVE TEXTS.
portion of the Pahlavi writing was nearly pure Chaldee, and was confined (as already stated) to the graphic represeuta- tion of most of the simplest and commonest words uncon- nected with religion; but it seems to have formed no part of the spoken language, at all events in late: times. Whereas the Semitic portion of modern Persian is borrowed trom Arabic, and includes most words connected with religion, science, and literature; in fact, every class of words except that which was usually Semitic in Pahlavi writings; and these Arabic words form an essential part of the spoken language, being as indispensable to the modern Persian as words of Norman-French origin are to the English.
In Pahlavi writings, moreover, besides the four hundred Semitic logograms already mentioned, we also find about one hundred obsolete forms of Iranian words used as logo- grams; much in the same way as ‘ye’ may be used for ‘the,’ and ‘ Xmas’ for ‘Christmas’ in English. The use of all these logograms was, however, quite optional, as their usual Persian equivalents might be substituted for any of them at any time, according to each particular writer’s taste and discretion. But whenever they are employed they form what is called the Huzvaris portion of the Pahlavi; while the other words, intended to be pronounced as they are spelt, form the Pazand portion.
Many attempts have been made to explain the word Huzvaris, but it cannot be said that any satisfactory etymology has yet been proposed. Like the word Pahlavi it seems hardly to occur in any old Pahlavi text, but only in colophons, chapter-headings, and similar notes of modern writers ; it seems, therefore, more reasonable to trace it to modern Persian than direct to any more ancient source. Its Pahlavi form, hazvaris or adzvarisn, appears to represent the modern Persian uzvAris, which is rarely used ; the usual Persian form of the word being zuvaris. Now zuvaris is precisely the form of an abstract noun derived from the crude forin of a verb zuvaridan, which has been admitted into some Persian dictionaries on the authority of Golius!,
* See Castelli Lexicon Heptaglotton, Pars altera, London, 1669.
INTRODUCTION, XV with the meaning ‘to grow old, to become thread-bare.’ If such a verb really exists in Persian, although its meaning may imply ‘decrepitude or decay’ rather than ‘antiquity or obsoleteness, yet its abstract noun would not be altogether inapplicable to the logograms used in Pahlavi, which are, in fact, last remnants of older writings.
The word Pazand is probably derived from Av. paiti- zanti, with the meaning ‘re-explanation,’ that is, a further interpretation of the Pahlavi Zand in the Persian vernacular. This term is applied not only to the purely Persian words in Pahlavi texts, but also (as already noticed) to translitera- tions of the said texts, either in Avesta or modern Persian characters, in which ail the Huzvaris words are replaced by their Pazand equivalents. These transliterations form what are called Pazand texts; they retain the exact idiom and construction of the Pahlavi original, and represent the mode in which it was read. It may be remarked, however, that all such Pazand texts, as have been examined, seem to have been written in India, so that they may be suspected of representing some corrupt Gugarati pronunciation of Persian, rather than the peculiar orthography of any period of the Persian language.
This theory of the origin and development of Pahlavi writing could hardly be upheld, unless we could trace the same artificial mixture of Huzvaris and Pazand in all acces- sible Pahlavi records, from their earliest appearance to the present time. This we are able to do, even in the scanty materials afforded by the legends on the provincial Persian coins of the third century B.C. and second century A.D. already mentioned. But we can trace it with greater cer- tainty not only in the coin legends, but also in the rock inscriptions of the earlier Sasanian kings (A.D. 226-388), in the latest of which we find the written language differing very slightly from that contained in the manuscripts pre- served by the Parsis of the present day, although the characters differ very much in form. And, finally, in the legends on the coins of the later Sasanian kings (A.D. 388- 651) and on seals of their times, we find even this difference in the shapes of the letters disappearing by degrees. In
XVI PAHLAVI TEXTS.
fact, all the materials at our disposal tend to show that Huzvaris has been an essential constituent of all Pahlavi writings from the time of Alexander’s successors to that of the disuse of Pahlavi characters; but we have no reason to suppose that the spoken language of the great mass of the Persian people ever contained the Semitic words which they thus used as Huzvaris in their writings.
Although the use of Huzvaris, until explained recently, rendered the nature of the Pahlavi language very obscure, it added very little to the difficulty of understanding the Pahlavi texts, because the meaning of nearly every Huz- varis logogram was well known; being recorded in an old glossary preserved by the Parsis, in which every logogram is explained by its proper Pazand equivalent. The extant copies of this old glossary generally contain the Huzvaris and Pazand words written in the Pahlavi character, together with their traditional pronunciation, either in Avesta or modern Persian letters; there is, there- fore, no particular difficulty in reading or translating the Huzvaris portion of a Pahlavi text, although doubts may often be entertained as to the accuracy of the traditional pronunciation.
The real difficulty of reading Pahlavi texts lies in the Pazand portion (so far as it may be unexplained by existing vocabularies), and is chiefly occasioned by the ambiguity of some of the Pahlavi letters. The alphabet used in Pahlavi books contains only fourteen distinct letters, so that some letters represent several different sounds; and this ambiguity is increased by the letters being joined together, when a compound of two letters is sometimes exactly like some other single letter. The complication arising from these ambiguities may be under- stood from the following list of the sounds, simple and compound, represented by each of the fourteen letters of the Pahlavi alphabet sespectively :—
Wa, 4,h,kh Lb Opi Pes Qk c ees,
l § z 98, yi, yad, yag, yag, di, dad, dag, dag, gi, gad,
gag, gag, gi, gad, gag, gag. ~~) sh, s, ya, yah, yakh, th, ikh,
INTRODUCTION. XVi
——t oe en
da, dah, dakn, ga, gah, gakh, ga, gah, gakh. 9 gh. gk. 6m. Jn,v,w,0,6,,1 oy, 146d, g,¢.
From this list it is easy to see the confusion produced by the letter 29 s being exactly like the letter 5 y doubled, and by the letter -%) sh being identical with a com- pound of 5 y and &% 4; and there are, in fact, some compounds of two letters which have from ten to fifteen sounds in common use, besides others which might pos- sibly occur. If it be further considered that there are only three letters (which are also consonants, as in most Semitic languages) to represent five long vowels, and that there are probably five short vowels to be understood, the difficulty of reading Pahlavi correctly may be readily imagined.
When Pahlavi writing was in common use this difficulty was probably no more felt by the Persians, than the com- plexity of Chinese characters is felt as an evil by a Chinese mandarin, or the corrupt system of English orthography by an educated Englishman. It is only the foreigner, or learner, who fully’appreciates the difficulty of understand- ing such cumbrous systems of writing.
With regard, however, to their Huzvaris logograms the
Persians seem to have experienced more difficulty. As
the actual sounds of these Semitic words were rarely
pronounced, in consequence of their Pazand equivalents
being substituted in reading, there must have been some
risk of their true pronunciation being forgotten. That
this risk was understood by the Persians, or Parsis, is
proved by the existence of the Huzvaris-Pazand glossary
already described, which was evidently compiled as a
record both of the pronunciation and meaning of the
Huzvaris logograms. But its compilation does not appear
to have been undertaken until the true pronunciation of
some of these logograms had been already lost. Thus,
although the traditional readings of most of the Semitic
portion of the Huzvaris can be readily traced to well-
known Chaldee words, there are yet many other such
readings which are altogether inexplicable as Semitic
XVill PAHLAVI TEXTS.
words. In most such cases, however, European scholars have found that the Huzvaris word can be easily read in some other way which at once connects it with some ordinary Chaldee equivalent. It may, therefore, be reason- ably assumed that the compilers of the glossary had in some instances lost the correct pronunciation of these old Semitic words, and that, in such cases, they adopted (as a Parsi would probably do at the present day) the most obvious reading of the letters before them, which thence- forth became an artificial word to be handed down to posterity, by successive generations of writers, with all the authority of old tradition.
