Middle Persian
Middle Persian or
Pahlavi is the
Iranian language spoken during
Sassanian times. It descended from
Old Persian.
Middle Persian was usually written in the
Pahlavi script. The language was also written down in the
Manichaean script by Persian-speaking
Manichaeans.
In the classification of the Iranian languages, the Middle Period includes those languages which were common in Iran, from the third century B.C. (the fall of the
Achaemenids) up to the seventh century A.D. (the fall of the
Sasanians). One of these languages is
Pahlavi or the Zoroastrian Middle Persian or which is a continuation of the
Old Persian.
The most important and distinct development in the structure of Iranian languages in the Middle Period (in the Mid-Wes Iran, Iranian languages), is its transformation from the synthetic form of the Old Period (Old Persian and
Avestan) to an analytic form i.e. the
nouns,
pronouns, and the
adjectives lost their
conjugative suffixes and changed to invariable words used in all grammatical cases; the gender and the dual number, also, disappeared. Prepositions were used to indicate the different roles of words, and the tenses changed from a synthetic form to composite ones.
One can imagine that this development had to do with the fact that Old Persian, as it appears in the inscriptions of
Bistun and
Persepolis, could have not possibly been the language of conversation, and, it could not have been simplified so much as is evident in the
Zoroastrian Middle Persian or Pahlavi, during only 500 years. Thus, one can conclude that Old Persian had been the language of literally writing, which was very different from the spoken language, and although, written Persian or Pahlavi, was its continuation, it was not a direct one and was greatly influenced by the spoken form of the language.
The modern-day descendant of Middle Persian is
Modern Persian. The changes between late Middle and early Modern Persian were very gradual, and in the 10th-11th centuries, Middle Persian texts were still intelligible to speakers of early Modern 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 of vowels in initial consonant clusters
**the loss of -g when word final
**change of initial w- to either b- or (gw- â†' 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 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 literature which details the traditions and prescriptions of the Zoroastrian religion which was the state religion of
Sassanid Iran (224 to ca. 650) before Iran was invaded by the
Arab armies that spread
Islam.
*
Old Persian language*
Pahlavi Literature*
Articles on Ancient Iranian Languages*
Iranian Languages Group
