Iranian languages

“ It is well known that the Iranian languages change s to h. The Tertiary Prakrits of the Outer Band find analogous difficulty in pronouncing a sibilant. The north-western languages change it to h as in Persian. Marathi changes s to ś before palatal sounds, and the same change occurs in Bengali in the case of every uncompounded sibilant. Eastern Bengali and Assamese go farther. Here s is again sounded almost like h. On the other hand, in the Midland, s rarely becomes h and then only when medial. In the Outer languages the palatal consonants are also liable to change ”

“ Not only amongst Iranian languages, but amongst all the languages of the Indo-European group, Zend takes one of the very highest places in importance for the comparative philologist. In age it almost rivals Sanskrit; in primitiveness it surpasses that language in many points; it is inferior only in respect of its less extensive literature, and because it has not been made the subject of systematic grammatical treatment. The age of Zend must be examined in connexion with the age of the Avesta. ”

“ Zend aeva-; Old Persian aiva-, where the Iranian group has the same stem as that seen in the Greek οἶ (F) ο-ς, “alone.”
For the subdivisions of the two groups see the articles on Persia: Language, and Indo-Aryan Languages. Dr Grierson has shown in his monograph on “The Pisaca Languages of North-Western India” (Royal Asiatic Society, 1906) that there is good reason for regarding various dialects of the north-western frontier (Kafiristan, Chitral, Gilgit, Dardistan) as a separate group descended from Aryan but independent of either Sanskrit or Iranian. ”

“ EXPLANATORY NOTES. “Aba-seine.”—The river Indus is so termed in the Pushtu language, and the word comes from the Arabic: Aba, father, and Seine, a river. Pushtu is spoken in the region of Kandahar Kafiristan, and round about Attock, and is said to bear a similarity to the Semitic and Iranian languages.
“Imam.”—From the Arabic, a leader in religious affairs; a priest of the Mahomedan faith; answers to “Mullah,” or “Mulwanah.” ”

“ As it was the Scoloti who gave names from their language to the rivers which flowed through their steppes, they must have pastured their flocks on them from an early period. Not less than these names, and the legend of the Scoloti about the antiquity of their nation and its origin from the Borysthenes, does the comparison of the Iranian languages support the conclusion that the Sarmatians and the Scoloti must have broken off from the tribes of Iran at a very early period, [512] and the Scoloti, who are situated further to the west on this side of the Don, earlier than the Sarmatians. ”

“ It strikes me, my dearest M., that we should be more correct in christening your essay Arian, instead of Iranian. I have always used Iranian as synonymous with Indo-Germanic (which [pg 430] expresses too much and too little) or (which is really a senseless name) Indo-European: Arian for the languages of Aria in the wider sense, for which Bactria may well have been the starting-point. Don't you think we may use Arian, when you confine yourself to Sanskrit, Zend, and Parsi?
I get more and more angry at L.'s perverseness in doubting that the Persians are Aryans. ”

“ As to other eases, I fail to enunciate any natural law, which causes the occurrence of the স্বরান্ত sound.
The scope of my subject did not allow me to notice the allied and cognate sound peculiarities as occur in other Aryan languages; I refer you however to a few Iranian peculiarities, just to suggest how wide our field of research is. In the first place we may notice, in connection with the sound of the vowel ঋ, that in Iranian, the radical 'ar' (ঋ) is reduplicated by ই; that the Indian sound of ঋ has always been 'ri' and not 'ru,' is clearly demonstrated by it. ”

“ We shall consider the Paisaci languages first. The Aryan family of languages is well known to belong to the Indo-European languages. This Aryan family, according to the latest researches is sub-divided into (1) Iranian (Eranian or Erano-Aryan) languages (2) Indo Aryan or Sanskritic Indo-Aryan languages, Iranian being also grouped into persian and non-Persian. Of these the Paisaci languages include Pashai, spoken in Laghman in Afghanistan ; a number of Kafir dialects of which the principal are Bashgai, Wai, and Kalasha ”

“ The Aryan or Indo-European languages fall into six leading groups (leaving Albanian and Armenian out of account) , thus:—
I. Indo-Iranian or Arian, divisible into two branches:
(a) Indian branch, including Sanskrit, now dead, but dating in its literature to at least 1000 b.c., and the descendant modern (dialects or) languages, such as Hindustani, Bengali, and Mahratti. ”

“ On the other hand, the comparison of Zend with Sanskrit left no alternative open to the assumption that these languages were modifications of an original Indo-Iranian tongue, spoken by a people of whom the Aryans of India and those of Persia were offshoots, and who could therefore be hardly lodged elsewhere than on the frontiers of both Persia and India—that is to say, somewhere in the region which is at present known under the names of Turkistan, Afghanistan, and Kafiristan. Thus far, it can hardly be doubted that we are well within the ground of which science has taken enduring possession. ”

“ The Iranians or Eranians occupy the Iranian plateau and the adjoining regions, especially to the east. They speak different languages of the Eranian branch of the Aryan linguistic family. In physical composition the main characters are supplied by the Assyroid race (Fig. 22) with admixture of Turkish elements in Persia and Turkey, Indo-Afghan elements in Afghanistan, and Arab and Negroid elements in the south of Persia and Baluchistan. ”

“ Old y often appears as j: Zend yāma (glass) , New Persian jām; yavan (a youth) , New Persian javān. Two consonants are not allowed to stand together at the beginning of a word; hence vowels are frequently inserted or prefixed, e.g. New Persian sitādan or istādan (to stand) , root stā, birādar (brother) , Zend and Pahlavī brātar. [78]
Amongst modern languages and dialects other than Persian which must be also assigned to the Iranian family may be mentioned:—Modern Dialects.
1. Kurdish, a language nearly akin to New Persian, with which it has important characteristics in common. ”

“ The Anaryans are represented in Europe by the Basques (whose language is not classified) , and by peoples of Finno-Ugrian languages (Lapps, Western Finns, Hungarians, and Eastern Finns; the latter partly in Asia) . The Caucasians are the native peoples of the Caucasus; they form four groups: Lesgian, Georgian or Kartvel, Cherkess, and Ossets. The language of the last is Iranian; the idioms of the three others form a group apart, not classified. ”

“ The Iranian tongues of the north-western frontier are only Indian in the fact that they happen to fall within the administrative border of British India. If we omit all consideration of these races and languages for the present, we shall be free to consider the long struggle {60} between the Aryan and the Dravidian. The Aryan religion, the religion of the Hindus, has spread all over India, and as the Dravidian temples of the south are among the glories of Hindu religious architecture, so the Hinduism of the south is now, in many ways, the most typical and interesting form of the religion. ”

“ Indeed its position in the same group with the Iranian, Classical, Slavono-Lithuanic, and Gothic tongues, supplied the reason for substituting the term Indo-European for the previous one Indo-Germanic.
2. Since the fixation of the Celtic, it has been considered that the Armenian is Indo-European. Perhaps the wellknown [Pg 145] affinity between the Armenian and Phrygian languages directed philologists to a comparison between the Armenian and Greek. Müller, in his Dorians, points out the inflexion of the Armenian verb-substantive. ”

“ Radiating as they did from a common centre, the adjacent groups are more like one another than those further off. The European languages, inclusive of Armenian, present the three primitive vowels a, e, o intact, while the Indo-Iranian group coalesces them all into the sound a. Again the Asiatic languages join with the Balto-Slavonic in changing Aryan palatal k into a sibilant sound. Similarly two or three other groups may be found with common peculiarities (e.g., Greek, Latin, and Celtic with oi or i in the nom. pl. masc. of the o- declension) . ”

“ Many of the above forms will be intelligible from a consideration of the closely allied Sanskrit, although they are not derived from that language; but some (e.g. those of the second person singular) can only be explained by the analogy of the Iranian and of the Piśāca languages.
The present participle is formed by adding ān to the root; thus, karān, making. It does not change for gender. From this we get a present and an imperfect, formed by adding respectively the present and past tenses of the auxiliary verb. Thus, kāran chus, I (masculine) am making, I make ”

“ Both Iranic and Galchic are thus rather linguistic than ethnic terms, and so true is this that a philologist always knows what is meant by an Iranic language, while the anthropologist is unable to define or form any clear conception of an Iranian, who may be either of long-headed Nordic or round-headed Alpine type. ”

“ It is therefore common and more correct to speak of the Iranian family. The original native name of the race which spoke these tongues was Aryan. King Darius is called on an inscription “a Persian, son of a Persian, an Aryan of Aryan race”; and the followers of the Zoroastrian religion in their earliest records never give themselves any other title but Airyavō danghavō, that is to say, “Aryan races.” The province of the Iranian language is bounded on the west by the Semitic, on the north and north-east by the Ural-altaic or Turanian, and on the south-east by the kindred language of India. ”

“ Arabic literature teems with allusions to the religions, dogma, customs and the court of Sasanian Iran. Once intended for contemporaries equally at home in the Arabic and Persian idioms these references have in course of time grown obscure to copyists who have mutilated Iranian names of persons and places and specific Zoroastrian terms which had become naturalised in the language of the ruling Arabs. It is scholars like Baron Rosen and Rosenberg who have adequately appreciated the value of Arabic texts in which are interwoven verbal translations of celebrated Pahlavi treatises. ”

“ In the mutual intercourse of nations, language assumes foreign elements easiest and preserves them the longest. The Persian dialect of modern Iran is overloaded with Arabian-Turkish words. Fars in the south, as well as Mazandran in the north, is in this only a little distinctive. In East Iran, nevertheless, the borrowed richness of language is certainly less ”

“ The distinctions between Sanskrit and Iranian are also clear, (1) The Aryan voiced aspirates gh, dh, bh, which survive in Sanskrit, are confused in Iranian with original g, d, b, and further changes take place in the language of the later parts of the Avesta; (2) the Aryan breathed aspirates kh, th, ph, except in combination with certain consonants, become spirants in Iranian; (3) Aryan s becomes h initially before vowels in Iranian and also in certain cases medially, Iranian in these respects resembling Greek (cf. Skt. saptá; Zend hapta; Gr. ἑπτά, “seven”) ”

“ It is, above all, Arabic literature which upsets the easy fiction of total destruction of Iranian culture by the Arabs. In its various departments of history, geography and general science Arabic works incorporate extensive material for a history of Iranian civilization, while Arabic poetry abounds in references to Zoroastrian Iran. The former is illustrated by Professor Inostranzev's pioneer Russian essay of which the main body of this book is a translation. ”

“ The structure of New Persian New Persian. has hardly altered at all since the Shāhnāma; but the original purism of Firdousī, who made every effort to keep the language free from Semitic admixture, could not long be maintained. Arabic literature and speech exercised so powerful an influence on New Persian, especially on the written language, that it could not withstand the admission of an immense number of Semitic words. There is no Arabic word which would be refused acceptance in good Persian. But, nevertheless, New Persian has remained a language of genuine Iranian stock. ”

“ But if he desires to distinguish himself as an eminent translator, and to understand not only the general purport of a composition, but even the graces and ornaments of it, he must necessarily learn the Arabick tongue, which is blended with the Persian in so singular a manner, that one period often contains both languages wholly distinct from each other in expression and idiom, but perfectly united in sense and construction. ”

“ Persian, but of the nationality of the same there is no accurate account; and however wide the opinion may extend with regard to stature and features, these appear rather to belong to the West Iranian than to the East Iranian, for the striking resemblance to the modern inhabitants of West Iran must be apparent to the eye of every one. Recent European travellers only cause us to observe the existing difference. ”

“ In addition to the foregoing fundamental wanderings, the inflow of an Iranian element, composed of men of Aryan speech, may be observed. This contingent marched out of the plateau of Iran and reached the Turkish highland without having to scale its slopes. As a result of this migration Persian words permeate Armenian [214] extensively. The Turks also have appropriated a certain amount of Persian words and culture from the [273] same source. Racially, however, the eastern element was absorbed by the Armenoid population. ”