Frahang-i Pahlavig
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''Frahang-ī Pahlavīg'' (
Middle Persian Middle Persian or Pahlavi, also known by its endonym Pārsīk or Pārsīg () in its later form, is a Western Middle Iranian language which became the literary language of the Sasanian Empire. For some time after the Sasanian collapse, Middle Per ...
: 𐭯𐭥𐭧𐭭𐭢 𐭯𐭧𐭫𐭥𐭩𐭪 "Pahlavi dictionary") is the title of an anonymous
dictionary A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies ...
of mostly
Aramaic The Aramaic languages, short Aramaic ( syc, ܐܪܡܝܐ, Arāmāyā; oar, 𐤀𐤓𐤌𐤉𐤀; arc, 𐡀𐡓𐡌𐡉𐡀; tmr, אֲרָמִית), are a language family containing many varieties (languages and dialects) that originated in ...
logogram In a written language, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced ''hanzi'' in Mandarin, ''kanji'' in Japanese, ''hanja'' in Korean) are generally logograms, as ...
s with
Middle Persian Middle Persian or Pahlavi, also known by its endonym Pārsīk or Pārsīg () in its later form, is a Western Middle Iranian language which became the literary language of the Sasanian Empire. For some time after the Sasanian collapse, Middle Per ...
translations (in
Pahlavi script Pahlavi is a particular, exclusively written form of various Middle Iranian languages. The essential characteristics of Pahlavi are: *the use of a specific Aramaic-derived script; *the incidence of Aramaic words used as heterograms (called '' ...
) and
transliteration Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one writing system, script to another that involves swapping Letter (alphabet), letters (thus ''wikt:trans-#Prefix, trans-'' + ''wikt:littera#Latin, liter-'') in predictable ways, such as ...
s (in
Pazend Pazend () or Pazand ( pal, 𐭯𐭠𐭰𐭭𐭣; ae, 𐬞𐬀𐬌𐬙𐬌 𐬰𐬀𐬌𐬥𐬙𐬌) is one of the writing systems used for the Middle Persian language. It was based on the Avestan alphabet, a phonetic alphabet originally used to ...
script).. Its date is unknown. The glossary was previously known to Indian Zoroastrians, called the
Parsis Parsis () or Parsees are an ethnoreligious group of the Indian subcontinent adhering to Zoroastrianism. They are descended from Persians who migrated to Medieval India during and after the Arab conquest of Iran (part of the early Muslim co ...
, as the ''mna-xvatay'' (traditionally pronounced ''mona khoda''), a name derived from the first two words (the lemma) of the first entry..


Relevant scripts' characteristics

The Pazend script has the following characteristics, as contrasted with the Pahlavi script: * Pazend is a variant of the
Avestan alphabet The Avestan alphabet (Middle Persian: transliteration: ''dyn' dpywryh'', transcription: ''dēn dēbīrē'', fa, دین دبیره, translit=din dabire) is a writing system developed during Iran's Sasanian era (226–651 CE) to render ...
(''Din dabireh''), a
phonetic Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...
alphabet. In contrast, Pahlavi is only an
abjad An abjad (, ar, أبجد; also abgad) is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with other alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels ...
. * Pazend does not have
ideograms An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek "idea" and "to write") is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarit ...
. In contrast, ideograms are an identifying feature of the Pahlavi system, and are words borrowed from
Semitic languages The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, the Horn of Africa, and latterly North Africa, Malta, West Africa, Chad, and in large immigra ...
such as
Aramaic The Aramaic languages, short Aramaic ( syc, ܐܪܡܝܐ, Arāmāyā; oar, 𐤀𐤓𐤌𐤉𐤀; arc, 𐡀𐡓𐡌𐡉𐡀; tmr, אֲרָמִית), are a language family containing many varieties (languages and dialects) that originated in ...
that continue to be spelled as in Aramaic transliterated into the Pahlavi script, yet are pronounced as the corresponding word in Persian.


Manuscripts and interpretations

The oldest surviving example of a ''Frahang''-like text is a one-page fragment discovered at
Turpan Turpan (also known as Turfan or Tulufan, , ug, تۇرپان) is a prefecture-level city located in the east of the autonomous region of Xinjiang, China. It has an area of and a population of 632,000 (2015). Geonyms The original name of the cit ...
that is believed to date to the 9th or 10th century CE. Several more complete manuscripts exist in Bombay, Oxford, Paris, and Copenhagen, but the oldest of these dates to the 15th century and is missing a second folio and all of folio 28 onwards. In the earliest edition made available to European scholarship, the ''Frahang'' is arranged serially; that is, according to the shape of the Aramaic characters. That edition, obtained by Abraham Anquetil-Duperron in the mid-18th century, is today in the
Bibliothèque nationale A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a vir ...
, Paris. In 1867, Hoshangji Jamaspji Asa and
Martin Haug Martin Haug (30 January 1827 – 3 June 1876) was a German orientalist. Biography Haug was born at Ostdorf (today a part of Balingen), Württemberg. He became a pupil in the gymnasium at Stuttgart at a comparatively late age, and in 1848 he en ...
published a transcript of a manuscript that was arranged thematically by chapter. The existence of similar glossaries from Akkadian times (explaining Sumerian logograms) led an
Assyriologist Assyriology (from Greek , ''Assyriā''; and , '' -logia'') is the archaeological, anthropological, and linguistic study of Assyria and the rest of ancient Mesopotamia (a region that encompassed what is now modern Iraq, northeastern Syria, southea ...
, Erich Ebeling, to explain that many of the words in the ''Frahang'' were derived from Sumerian or
Akkadian Akkadian or Accadian may refer to: * Akkadians, inhabitants of the Akkadian Empire * Akkadian language, an extinct Eastern Semitic language * Akkadian literature, literature in this language * Akkadian cuneiform Cuneiform is a logo- syllabi ...
. This led to a number of "far-fetched interpretations,". which were then subsequently incorporated into a number of later interpretations, including those of Iranists, so effectively making even these unreliable.


Structure and content

The glossary encompasses approximately five hundred (not counting variations)
Semitic language The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, the Horn of Africa, and latterly North Africa, Malta, West Africa, Chad, and in large immigrant a ...
heterograms (''huzvarishn'', "probably mean ng'obsoleteness, antiquity, or archaism'".), "in the form used by Zoroastrians in writing Middle Persian (Book Pahlavi), each explained by a "phonetic" writing of the corresponding Persian word." Besides heterograms of Aramaic origin, the ''Frahang'' also has a handful of pseudo-heterograms from "Arabic words coined by later scribes" and "scattered examples of historical spellings of
Iranian Iranian may refer to: * Iran, a sovereign state * Iranian peoples, the speakers of the Iranian languages. The term Iranic peoples is also used for this term to distinguish the pan ethnic term from Iranian, used for the people of Iran * Iranian lan ...
words, no longer recognized as such." Altogether about 1300 words (including word forms) are represented, "but its original extent appears to have been only 1000 words, excluding the appendices." Several heterograms are not attested in any other text. While the one-page Turpan fragment lists various forms for verbs followed by one Middle Persian translation (in the infinitive), other manuscripts list at most three verb forms, but then provide Middle Persian equivalents of each. The primary elements (logogram(s) and translation) "are then transcribed interlinearly, and more or less corruptly, into Avestan letters, i.e., into Pāzand, whereby the heterograms appear in their traditional mnemonic pronunciation. Because of the ambiguity of the Pahlavi script this is often far removed from the original Aramaic spellings.". In the manuscript examined by Asa and Haug, the ''huzvarishn'' and translations are in black, and the Pazend transliterations are in red (the first chapter is an exception, and is entirely in black). Substituting Latin characters (and written left-to-right) for Pahlavi and Pazend ones (which are written right-to-left), ''Frahang'' glosses look like this: Thus, "king" would be written but understood in Iran to be the ''sign'' for 'shāh'. In the Asa and Haug manuscript, the ''Frahang'' is organized thematically, divided into (approximately) thirty chapters. Eighteen of these chapters have titles (listed below in italics), the others do not. West ends his description at chapter 23 as "no further chapters are indicated." The last section/chapter is a collection of older Iranian language words (and variant spellings), with more modern words explaining the older terms.


References


Citations


Sources

* * * Encyclopædia Iranica
Huswāreš
{{DEFAULTSORT:Frahang-I Pahlavig Aramaic texts Aramaic dictionaries and grammars Middle Persian Middle Persian literature Zoroastrian texts