IRANIAN LANGUAGES

subgroup of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. The subgroup's languages are spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and parts of Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, and scattered areas of the Caucasus Mountains. Old Iranian, which is closely related to Sanskrit, the ancient Indo-Aryan language, is known from the Avesta (the sacred book of Zoroastrianism) and from Old Persian cuneiform inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings. The Middle Iranian stage (3rd century BC to 8th10th century AD) was characterized by a significant simplification of the verbal system and, in some areas, by reductions in noun inflection as well. Among the most important representatives of Middle Iranian are Parthian, Pahlavi, and Sogdian. Major modern Iranian languages are Persian, the most widespread; the Kurdish dialects; Pashto, an official language of Afghanistan; and Tajik, spoken in Tajikistan. All Iranian languages currently spoken show a simplification of the earlier sound systems and a preference for the use of auxiliary verbs in place of the complex verb conjugations of the earlier Iranian languages. subgroup of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. Iranian languages are spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and parts of Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, and scattered areas of the Caucasus Mountains. Linguists typically approach the Iranian languages in historical terms because they fall readily into three distinct categoriesAncient, Middle, and Modern Iranian. Additional reading General works An important comprehensive treatment of the Iranian languages in general is the older study by Wilhelm Geiger and Ernst Kuhn (eds.), Grundriss der iranischen Philologie, 2 vol. (18951904, reprinted 1974). This invaluable work is now in many respects antiquated, and it contains no account of several Middle Iranian languages that have been made known only in this century. A more recent account in less detail is provided by the Handbuch der Orientalistik, vol. 1, sect. 4, Iranistik, pt. 1, Linguistik (1958). Some useful bibliography with brief guidelines is given by D.N. Mackenzie, Iranian Languages, in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Current Trends in Linguistics, vol. 5 (1969), pp. 450477. Old Iranian A large number of Old Persian texts are given in transcription and translation in Roland Kent, Old Persian, 2nd ed. rev. (1953). Information on Old Persian linguistic problems is contained in Wilhelm Brandenstein and Manfred Mayrhofer, Handbuch des Altpersischen (1964). On the Avestan language the article by Georg Morgenstierne, Orthography and Sound-System of the Avesta, in Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskap, 12:3082 (1942), is of great importance. A useful bibliographical guide to work on Avestan is provided by J. Duchesne-Guillemin, L'tude de l'iranien ancien au vingtime sicle, Kratylos, 7:144 (1962). Middle Iranian The verbal system of Parthian is described by A. Ghilain, Essai sur la langue parthe, son systme verbal d'aprs les textes manichens (1939, reprinted 1966); and for Middle Persian by W. Henning, Das Verbum des Mittelpersischen der Turfanfragmente, Zeitschrift fr Indologie und Iranistik, 9:158253 (1933). A Pahlavi dictionary for students is D.N. Mackenzie, A Concise Pahlavi Dictionary (1971). The grammar of Sogdian has received detailed treatment in Ilya Gershevitch, A Grammar of Manichean Sogdian (1954); and of Khotanese in R.E. Emmerick, Saka Grammatical Studies (1968). A brief sketch of Khwarezmian is given in W.B. Henning, The Khwarezmian Language, Zeki Velidi Togan'a Armagan, pp. 421436 (1955). Modern Iranian A work of considerable importance is Gilbert Lazard, Grammaire du persan contemporain (1957). For the early stages of Modern Persian, Lazard's Langue des plus anciens monuments de la prose persane (1963) is invaluable. The same author has provided a comprehensive guide to the most important linguistic features of Tadzhik in Caractres distinctifs de la langue tadjik, Bulletin de la Socit linguistique de Paris, 52:117186 (1956). A treatment of Baluchi dialects is J.H. Elfenbein, The Baluchi Language (1966). Of the many works describing Kurdish dialects, a comprehensive modern work is D.N. Mackenzie, Kurdish Dialect Studies, 2 vol. (196162). For the history of the Pashto language, Georg Morgenstierne, An Etymological Vocabulary of Pashto (1927), remains standard. Morgenstierne's Indo-Iranian Frontier Languages, 4 vol. in 6, 2nd rev. ed., with additional material (1973), is the work most frequently quoted for most of the minor languages. Ossetic has been described by a native speaker: V.I. Abaev, A Grammatical Sketch of Ossetic (1964; originally published in Russian, 1959). Ronald Eric Emmerick Middle Iranian Modern Iranian Of the modern Iranian languages, by far the most widely spoken is Persian, which, as already indicated, developed from Middle Persian and Parthian (with elements from other Iranian languages such as Sogdian) as early as the 9th century AD. Since then, it has changed little except for acquiring an increasing proportion of loanwords, mainly from Arabic. Persian has been a literary language since the 9th century, and there is an increasing awareness of the continuity of its literary tradition with the earlier periods. As the national language of Iran in succession to Middle Persian, it has for centuries strongly influenced the other Iranian languages, especially on Iranian territory. In fact, it seems likely that, with the increase of modern methods of communication, Persian will eventually supplant entirely most of the other languages and dialects. Against this trend stand only Kurdish and Balochi, the speakers of which tend to regard their languages as an expression of their particular identities. Nevertheless, even Kurdish and Balochi have been and continue to be strongly influenced by Persian. Outside Iran the situation is rather different. In Afghanistan the first national language is Pashto, even though Persian is the official second language. Pashto became the official language by royal decree in 1936, and literary activity has been encouraged by the Pashto Tolana (Pashto Society) of Kabul. During the Soviet period both Ossetic and Tajik received official encouragement; nevertheless, both languages were displaced by the Russian language as the language of administration. Other languages also compete with Ossetic and Tajik. Though it has a large body of folk epics, Ossetic became a literary language only in the second half of the 19th century. By contrast, the neighbouring Georgian has a still flourishing ancient literary tradition dating back to the 5th century AD and has many more speakers. Tajik, on the other hand, has a lifeline through its close connection with Persian, but it too has been retreating before Uzbek, an unrelated language of the Turkic group. Characteristics of the Iranian languages All Iranian languages show in their basic elements the characteristic features of an Indo-European language. Apart from the extensive borrowing of Arabic words in Modern Persian, the Iranian languages have scarcely been affected by unrelated languages, with the notable exception of Ossetic, which has been strongly influenced by the neighbouring Caucasian languages. Some dialects of Tajik have been very receptive to Uzbek elements. In the case of languages in contact with Indian civilization, the most noticeable non-Iranian feature often taken over is the Indo-Aryan series of retroflex sounds. These are foreign to Indo-Aryan itself, being a result of the influence of the Dravidian languages. The elaborate phonological and morphological structure of the Indo-European parent language has been progressively simplified in the development of the Iranian languages. The basic phonological structure of Common Old Iranian has on the whole been maintained, but the morphological system has continued to be simplified. There has been a constant move in almost all Iranian languages toward an analytic structure; i.e., the use of prepositions and word order rather than case endings to indicate grammatical relationships. Middle Iranian The Middle Iranian stage. Middle Persian, the major form of which is called Pahlavi, was the official language of the Sasanians (AD 224651). The most important of the Middle Persian inscriptions is that of Shapur I (d. AD 272), which has parallel versions in Parthian and Greek. Middle Persian was also the language of the Manichaean and Zoroastrian books written during the 3rd to the 10th century AD. The extant literature of the Zoroastrian books is much more extensive than that of the Manichaean texts, but the latter have the advantage of having been recorded in a clear and unambiguous script. Moreover, the Middle Persian of the Zoroastrian books does not simply represent the spoken language of the writers of the 9th-century Zoroastrian texts. It is probable that they spoke early Modern Persian and that their speech often impinged upon their writing but that they strove to write the Middle Persian of several centuries earlier as it was attested in the inscriptions of the early Sasanian dynasty when Middle Persian was the koine. By contrast, in the case of Manichaean Middle Persian, some texts survive unchanged from the 3rd century AD, the time of the Persian teacher Mani himself (AD 216274). Very little Parthian survives from the pre-Sasanian period. A large number of Parthian ostraca (inscribed pottery fragments) from the 1st century BC were discovered at Nisa near modern Ashkhabad, but they are inscribed in ideographic Aramaic (i.e., Aramaic writing that uses Aramaic words as symbols to represent Parthian words). Dating before the 3rd century are a document from Hawraman, some coin legends, and a dated grave stele. The most copious and important material in Parthian is the work of the Sasanian kings of the 3rd century, who added a Parthian version to their inscriptionsHajjiabad, Naqsh-e Rustam (Ka'be yi Zardusht), and Paikla. A few decades later Parthian disappeared as a result of the rise of the Sasanians and the predominance of their native tongue, Middle Persian. Manichaean Parthian of the 3rd century was preserved as a church language in Central Asia. The oldest surviving Sogdian documents are the so-called Ancient Letters found in a watchtower on the Chinese Great Wall, west of Tun-huang, and dated at the beginning of the 4th century AD. Most of the religious literature written in Sogdian dates from the 9th and 10th centuries. The Manichaean, Buddhist, and Christian Sogdian texts come mainly from small communities of Sogdians in the T'u-lu-p'an (Turfan) oasis and in Tun-huang. From Sogdiana itself there is only a small collection of documents from Mt. Mugh in the Zarafsha n region, mainly the business correspondence of a minor Sogdian king, Dewashtich, from the time of the Arab conquest about 700. The relationship of the various forms of Sogdian to one another has not yet been sufficiently investigated, so that it is not clear whether different dialects are represented by the extant material or whether the differences can be accounted for by reference to other relevant factors, such as differences of script, period, subject, style, or social milieu. The importance of social milieu can be seen by comparing the elegant Manichaean literature directed to the court with the more vulgar language of the Christian literature directed to the lower classes. Of the Saka dialect known as Tumshuq very little has survived, and despite its evidently close relationship to the much better known Khotanese dialect, full interpretation has proved difficult. Knowledge of Khotanese is more firmly based on a substantial corpus of material, including extensive bilingual texts. Although the chronological range of the extant Khotanese material is limited to only a few centuries, probably the 7th to the 10th, a rapid development of the language is apparent. At the phonological level, most noticeable is the loss of syllables between the older and later stages of the language. Thus, hvatana- Khotanese at the oldest stage is successively weakened to hvatna-, hvamna-, hvana-, hvam. At the morphological level, most striking is the tendency to simplify the case endings and even to replace them by analytical expressions, constructions of two or more words. Thus, Late Khotanese has raksaysa hiya rade kings of the raksasas, whereas Old Khotanese would have raksaysnu rrunde. The Old Khotanese -nu ending is unmistakably genitive plural, but the Late Khotanese -a is merely a general oblique plural ending and has been reinforced by hiya own, used to mean of. Khotan was a great centre of Buddhism during the 1st millennium AD, and all the surviving literature in Khotanese is either Buddhist or coloured by Buddhism. Even in business documents and official letters the Buddhist background is usually not difficult to discern. It can scarcely be coincidental that the Buddhist literature of Khotan, flourishing so vigorously during the 10th century, ended abruptly with the Muslim conquest at the beginning of the 11th. Little survives of Bactrian and Scytho-Sarmatian. Knowledge of Bactrian is based almost entirely on a single inscription of 25 lines from Ateshkadeh-ye Sorkh Kowtal in northern Afghanistan. Even less is known of Scytho-Sarmatian. Little is also known of Old Khwarezmian; that is, Khwarezmian written in the indigenous Khwarezmian script. Apart from a few coin legends and inscriptions on silver vessels, the material that survives consists of inscriptions of the 2nd century AD from Topraq-qal'ah (Toprakkala) and of the 7th from Toqqal'ah, archaeological sites in Uzbekistan. Much more is known of Late Khwarezmian, written in the Arabic script. This material is found mainly in two Arabic works, the 13th-century fiqh work of Mukhtar az-Zahidi, called the Qunyat almunyah, and the Arabic dictionary Muqaddimat al-Adab of az-Zamakhshari (10751144), of which a manuscript glossed in Khwarezmian was found.