Middle Persian, sometimes referred to as Pahlavi or Pehlevi^[1], is the Middle Iranian The Iranian languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family and its subfamily, Indo-Iranian. They are spoken by the Iranian peoples. Old Persian is the oldest recorded Iranian language language/ethnolect of Southwestern Iran that during Sassanid The Sassanid Empire , known to its inhabitants as Ērānshahr and Ērān, was the last pre-Islamic Persian Empire, ruled by the Sasanian Dynasty from 224 to 651. The Sassanid Empire, which succeeded the Parthian Empire, was recognized as one of the two main powers in Western Asia and Europe, alongside the Roman Empire and later the Byzantine times (224-654 CE) became a prestige dialect In sociolinguistics, prestige describes the level of respect accorded to a language or dialect as compared to that of other languages or dialects in a speech community. The concept of prestige in sociolinguistics is closely related to that of prestige or class within a society. Generally, there is positive prestige associated with the language or and so came to be spoken in other regions as well. Middle Persian is classified as Western Iranian language The Western Iranian languages are a subgroup of the Iranian languages, attested from the time of Old Persian. It descends from Old Persian The Old Persian language is one of the two attested Old Iranian languages . Old Persian appears primarily in the inscriptions, clay tablets, seals of the Achaemenid era (c. 600 BCE to 300 BCE). Examples of Old Persian have been found in what is now present-day Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Egypt the most important attestation by far being the contents of and is the nominal ancestor of Persian Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is widely spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and to some extent in Iraq, Bahrain, and Oman. New Persian, which usually is called also by the names of Farsi, Parsi, Dari or Parsi-ye-Dari (Dari Persian), can be classified linguistically.

The native name for Middle Persian (and perhaps for Old Persian also) was Pārsik, "(language) of Pārs", present-day Fārs Province Fārs (pronounced /fɑːs/ (Persian: Fārs, Pārs) (Originally Pars) is one of the 30 provinces of Iran. It is in the south of the country and its center is Shiraz. It has an area of 122,400 km². In 2006, this province had a population of 4.34 million people, of which 61.2% were registered as urban dwellers, 38.1% villagers, and 0.7% nomad tribes. The word is consequently (the origin of) the native name for the Modern Persian Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is widely spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and to some extent in Iraq, Bahrain, and Oman. New Persian, which usually is called also by the names of Farsi, Parsi, Dari or Parsi-ye-Dari (Dari Persian), can be classified linguistically language.

Middle Persian was most frequently written in the Pahlavi writing system,^[2] which was also the preferred writing system for other Middle Iranian The Iranian languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family and its subfamily, Indo-Iranian. They are spoken by the Iranian peoples. Old Persian is the oldest recorded Iranian language languages. Other forms of written Middle Persian include Pazend, a system derived from Avestan that, unlike Pahlavi, indicated vowels and did not employ Aramaic logograms. The ISO 639 ISO 639 is the set of international standards that lists short codes for language names. It was also the name of the original standard, approved in 1967 and withdrawn in 2002[citation needed] language code for Middle Persian is 'pal', which reflects the post-Sassanid-era use of the term Pahlavi to refer to the language and not only the script. "Most texts, which include translated versions of the Zoroastrian Zoroastrianism is a religion and philosophy based on the teachings of prophet Zoroaster . It was probably founded some time before the 6th century BC in Iran. The term Zoroastrianism is, in general usage, essentially synonymous with Mazdaism (the worship of Ahura Mazda, exalted by Zoroaster as the supreme divine authority) canon, are 14th century transcriptions of texts from the 9th to the 11th century, when it had long ceased to be a spoken language." This late form "is thus not representative of the real state of Middle Persian."^[1]

Transition from Old Persian

In the classification of the Iranian languages, the Middle Period includes those languages which were common in Iran from the fall of the Achaemenids The Achaemenid Empire , also known as the Persian Empire, was the successor state of the Median Empire, ruling over significant portions of what would become Greater Iran. The Persian and the Median Empire taken together are also known as the Medo-Persian Empire, which encompassed the combined territories of several earlier empires in the 3rd century BCE up to the fall of the Sassanids The Sassanid Empire , known to its inhabitants as Ērānshahr and Ērān, was the last pre-Islamic Persian Empire, ruled by the Sasanian Dynasty from 224 to 651. The Sassanid Empire, which succeeded the Parthian Empire, was recognized as one of the two main powers in Western Asia and Europe, alongside the Roman Empire and later the Byzantine in the 7th century CE.

The most important and distinct development in the structure of Iranian languages of this period is the transformation from the synthetic form of the Old Period (Old Persian The Old Persian language is one of the two attested Old Iranian languages . Old Persian appears primarily in the inscriptions, clay tablets, seals of the Achaemenid era (c. 600 BCE to 300 BCE). Examples of Old Persian have been found in what is now present-day Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Egypt the most important attestation by far being the contents of and Avestan Avestan is an East Iranian language known only from its use as the language of Zoroastrian scripture, i.e. the Avesta, from which it derives its name. The Yaz culture has been regarded as a likely archaeological reflection of early East Iranian culture as described in the Avesta. Its status as a sacred language has ensured its continuing use for) to an analytic In morphological typology , an isolating language (in fact the most extreme case of an analytic language) is any language in which words are composed of a single morpheme. This is in contrast to a synthetic language which can have words composed of multiple morphemes form:

• nouns A noun can co-occur with an article or an attributive adjective. Verbs and adjectives can't. In the following, an asterisk in front of an example means that this example is ungrammatical, pronouns In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun (or noun phrase) with or without a determiner, such as you and they in English. The replaced phrase is called the antecedent of the pronoun, and adjectives In grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to modify a noun or pronoun, giving more information about the noun or pronoun's referent. Collectively, adjectives form one of the traditional English eight parts of speech, though linguists today distinguish adjectives from words such as determiners that also used to be considered lost their case In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is a change in form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a noun may play the role of subject , of direct object ("John kicked me"), or of possessor ("My ball"). Languages such as ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit had ways of altering or inflections In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, mood, voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case. Conjugation is the inflection of verbs; declension is the inflection of nouns, adjectives and pronouns
• the dual was lost
• prepositions In grammar, a preposition is a part of speech that introduces a prepositional phrase. For example, in the sentence "The cat sleeps on the sofa", the word "on" is a preposition, introducing the prepositional phrase "on the sofa". In English, the most used prepositions are "of", "to", "in", were used to indicate the different roles of words.
• many tenses Tense is one of at least four qualities, along with mood, voice, and aspect, which utterances may express began to be formed from a composite form

Transition to New Persian

The modern-day descendant of Middle Persian is New Persian Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is widely spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and to some extent in Iraq, Bahrain, and Oman. New Persian, which usually is called also by the names of Farsi, Parsi, Dari or Parsi-ye-Dari (Dari Persian), can be classified linguistically. The changes between late Middle and Early New Persian were very gradual, and in the 10th-11th centuries, Middle Persian texts were still intelligible to speakers of Early New Persian. However, there are definite differences that had taken place already by the 10th century:

• Sound changes, such as
  • the dropping of unstressed initial vowels
  • the epenthesis In phonology, epenthesis is the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially to the interior of a word. Epenthesis may be divided into two types: excrescence (if the sound added is a consonant) and anaptyxis (if the sound added is a vowel) of vowels in initial consonant clusters
  • the loss of -g when word final
  • change of initial w- to either b- or (gw- → g-)
• Changes in the verbal system, notably the loss of distinctive subjunctive and optative forms, and the increasing use of verbal prefixes to express verbal moods
• Changes in the vocabulary, especially the substitution of a large number of Arabic loanwords By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept, whereby it is the meaning or idiom that is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort, while calque is a loanword from French for words of native origin
• The substitution of Arabic script for Pahlavi script.

Pahlavi Middle Persian is the language of quite a large body of Zoroastrian Zoroastrianism is a religion and philosophy based on the teachings of prophet Zoroaster . It was probably founded some time before the 6th century BC in Iran. The term Zoroastrianism is, in general usage, essentially synonymous with Mazdaism (the worship of Ahura Mazda, exalted by Zoroaster as the supreme divine authority) literature which details the traditions and prescriptions of the Zoroastrian religion which was the state religion of Sassanid The Sassanid Empire , known to its inhabitants as Ērānshahr and Ērān, was the last pre-Islamic Persian Empire, ruled by the Sasanian Dynasty from 224 to 651. The Sassanid Empire, which succeeded the Parthian Empire, was recognized as one of the two main powers in Western Asia and Europe, alongside the Roman Empire and later the Byzantine Iran (224 to ca. 650) before Iran Iran (Persian: ایران [ʔiˈɾɒn] ), officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and formerly known as Persia, is a country in Central Eurasia and Western Asia. The name Iran has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was widely known as Persia. Both Persia and Iran are was invaded by the Arab Arab people or Arabs (العرب al-ʿarab) are a panethnicity of peoples of various ancestral origins, religious backgrounds and historic identities, whose members, on an individual basis, identify as such on one or more of linguistic, cultural, political, or genealogical grounds. Those self-identifying as Arab, however, rarely do so with it as armies that spread Islam Islam (Arabic: الإسلام‎ al-’islām, pronounced [ʔislæːm] [note 1]) is the monotheistic religion articulated by the Qur’an, a text considered by its adherents to be the verbatim word of their one, incomparable God (Arabic: الله‎, Allāh), and by the Prophet of Islam Muhammad's teachings and normative example (in Arabic called.

Samples

Below is transliteration and translation of the first page of the facsimile known as Arda Wiraz Namag or The Book of the Righteous Wiraz, originally written in Pahlavi script Pahlavi or Pahlevi denotes a particular and exclusively written form of various Middle Iranian languages. The essential characteristics of Pahlavi are.^[3]

A sample Middle Persian poem from manuscript of Jamasp Asana:

In New Persian Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is widely spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and to some extent in Iraq, Bahrain, and Oman. New Persian, which usually is called also by the names of Farsi, Parsi, Dari or Parsi-ye-Dari (Dari Persian), can be classified linguistically:

Translation:

See also

• Old Persian The Old Persian language is one of the two attested Old Iranian languages . Old Persian appears primarily in the inscriptions, clay tablets, seals of the Achaemenid era (c. 600 BCE to 300 BCE). Examples of Old Persian have been found in what is now present-day Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Egypt the most important attestation by far being the contents of
• History of Persian language
• Pahlavi Literature Middle Persian literature is Persian literature of the 1st millennium AD, especially of the Sassanid period

References and bibliography

1. ^ ^{a b} "Linguist List - Description of Pehlevi". Detroit: Eastern Michigan University. 2007. http://linguistlist.org/forms/langs/LLDescription.cfm?code=pal.
2. ^ See also Omniglot.com's page on Middle Persian scripts
3. ^ R. Mehri's Parsik/Pahlavi Web page

Categories: Middle Persian | Persian language | Extinct languages of Asia | Medieval languages | Classical languages | Sassanid Empire

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