Pahari

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Pahari (also known as Pahaari), is a general term for various dialects spoken in the Indian part of the central Himalayan range. The word is derived from 'pahar' or 'pahad' meaning 'mountain'. The term 'Pahaari/Pahari' in Hindi, Urdu, or Punjabi means "language of the mountain people". Pahari dialects are found in the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttaranchal (traditionally called Uttarakhand). Western Pahari (Himachali) dialects include: Pothohari/Potwari, Kangri, Kullu, Mandyali, etc. The dialects spoken in Uttaranchal/Uttarakhand include Garhwali, Kumaoni and others. Garhwali itself has many dialects spoken in different parts of the state, like Jaunsari, Jadhi, etc. In the UK the language is referred to colloquially as "mawri twaree" (mine and yours)

The words Garhwali and Kumaoni are also used to refer to people speaking those dialects. It is noteworthy that most people consider pahari language to be same or just a variant of Punjabi. In Pakistan, Pahari language is sometimes calld Dhanni or Jhelumi and in some places it is called Mirpuri but any native speaker of Punjabi can understand it. There are also speakers of various Pahari dialects living in the mountainous north of Pakistan, between Kashmir and Afghanistan - although these dialects are increasingly coming under the influence of the national language Urdu and also Punjabi.

(properly Pahari, the language of the mountains), a general name applied to the Indo-Aryan languages or dialects spoken in the lower ranges of the Himalaya from Nepal in the east, to Chamba of the Punjab in the west. These forms of speech fall into three groups - an eastern, consisting of the various dialects of Khas-kura, the language of Nepal; a central, spoken in the north of the United Provinces, in Kumaon and Garhwal; and a western, spoken in the country round Simla and in Chamba. In Nepal, Khas-kura is the language only of the Aryan population, the mother tongue of most of the inhabitants being some form or other of Tibeto-Burman speech (see Tibeto-Burman Languages), not Indo-Aryan. As may be expected, Khas-kura is mainly differentiated from Central Pahari through its being affected, both in grammar and vocabulary, by Tibeto-Burman idioms. The speakers of Central and Western Pahari have not been brought into close association with Tibeto-Burmans, and their language is therefore purely Aryan.

Khas-kura, as its speakers themselves call it, passes under various names. The English generally call it Nepali or Naipali (i.e. the language of Nepal), which is a misnomer, for it is not the principal form of speech used in that country. Moreover, the Nepalese employ a corruption of this very word to indicate what is really the main language of the country, viz. the TibetoBurman Newari. Khas-kura is also called Garkhali, or the language of the Gurkhas, and Pahari or Parbatiya, the language of the mountains. The number of speakers is not known, no census ever having been taken of Nepal; but in British India 143,721143,721 were recorded in the census of 1901, most of whom were soldiers in, or others connected with, the British Gurkha regiments.

Central Pahari includes three dialects - Garhwali, spoken mainly in Garhwal and the country round the hill station of Mussoorie; Jaunsari, spoken in the Jaunsar tract of Dehra Dun; and Kumauni, spoken in Kumaun, including the country round the hill station of Naini Tal. In 1901 the number of speakers was 1,270,931.

Western Pahari includes a great number of dialects. In the Simla Hill states alone no less than twenty-two, of which the most important are Sirmauri and Keonthali (the dialect of Simla itself), were recorded at the last census. To these may be added Chambiali and Churahi of the state of Chamba, Mandeali of the state of Mandl, ]: of Chamba and Kangra, Kuluhi of Kulu and others. In 1901 the total number of speakers was 1,710,029.

The southern face of the Himalaya has from time immemorial been occupied by two classes of people. In the first place there is an Indo-Chinese overflow from Tibet in the north. Most of these tribes speak Indo-Chinese languages of the Tibeto-Burman family, while a few have abandoned their ancestral speech and now employ broken half-Aryan dialects. The other class consists of the great tribe of Khasas or Khasiyas, Aryan in origin, the Kavcoc of the Greek geographers. Who these people originally were, and how they entered India, are questions which have been more than once discussed without arriving at any very definite conclusion.' They are frequently mentioned in Sanskrit literature, were a thorn in the side of the rulers of Kashmir, and have occupied the lower Himalayas for many centuries. Nothing positive is known about their language, which they have long abandoned. Judging from the relics of it which appear in modern Pahari, it is probable that it belonged to the ' See ch. iv. of vol. ii. of R. T. Atkinson's Himalayan Districts of the North-Western Provinces of India, forming vol. xi of the "Gazetteer of the North-Western Provinces" (Allahabad, 1884), and the Archaeological Survey of India, xiv. 125 sqq. (Calcutta, 1882).

same group as Kashmiri, Lahnda and Sindhi. They spread slowly from west to east, and are traditionally said to have reached Nepal in the early part of the 12th century A.D. In the central and western Pahari tracts local traditions assert that from very early times there was constant communication with Rajputana and with the great kingdom of Kanauj in the Gangetic Doab. A succession of immigrants, the tide of which was materially increased at a later period by the pressure of the Mussulman invasion of India, entered the country, and founded several dynasties, some of which survive to the present day. These Rajputs intermarried with the Khasa inhabitants of their new home, and gave their rank to the descendants of these mixed unions. With the pride of birth these new-born Rajputs inherited the language of their fathers, and thus the tongue of the ruling class, and subsequently of the whole population of this portion of the Himalaya, became a form of Rajasthani, the language spoken in distant Rajputana. The Rajput occupation of Nepal is of later date. In the early part of the 16th century a number of Rajputs of Udaipur in Rajputana, being oppressed by the Mussulmans, fled north and settled in Garhwal, Kumaon, and western Nepal. In A.D. 1 559 a party of these conquered the small state of Gurkha, which lay about 70 m. north-west of Katmandu, the present capital of Nepal. In 1768 Prithwi Narayan Shah, the then Rajput ruler of Gurkha, made himself master of the whole of Nepal and founded the present Gurkhali dynasty of that country. His successors extended their rule westwards over Kumaon and Garhwal, ar,d as far as the Simla Hill states. The inhabitants of Nepal included not only Aryan Khasas, but also, as has been said, a number of Tibeto-Burman tribes. The Rajputs of Gurkha could not impose their language upon these as they did upon the Khasas, but, owing to its being the tongue of the ruling race, it ultimately became generally understood and employed as the lingua franca of this polyglot country. Although the language of the Khasas has disappeared, the tribe is still numerically the most important Aryan one in this part of the Himalaya, and it hence gave its name to its newly adopted speech, which is at the present day locally known as "Khas-kura." In the manner described above the Aryan language of the whole Pahari area is now a form of Rajasthani, exhibiting at the same time traces of the old Khasa language which it superseded, and also in Nepal of the Tibeto-Burman forms of speech by which it is surrounded. (For information regarding Rajasthani the reader is referred to the articles Indo-Aryan Languages; Prakrit; and Gujarati.) Khas-kura shows most traces of Tibeto-Burman influence. The gender of nouns is purely sexual, and, although there is an oblique case derived from Rajasthani, it is so often confounded with the nominative, that in the singular number either can be employed for the other. Both these are due to Tibeto-Burman influence, but the non-Aryan idiom is most prominent in the use of the verb. There is an indefinite tense referring to present, past or future time according to the context, formed by suffixing the verb substantive to the root of the main verb, exactly as in some of the neighbouring TibetoBurman languages. There is a complete impersonal honorific conjugation which reminds one strongly of Tibetan, and, in colloquial speech, as in that tongue, the subject of any tense of a transitive verb, not only of a tense derived from the past participle, is put into the agent case.

Khas-kura.

Kumauni.

Kashmiri.

Masc.

Fern.

Masc.

Fern.

Masc.

Fern.

I am. .. .

Thou art.. .

He is .

chu

chas

cha

chu

ches

the

chic

chai

chu

chi

thus

chukh

chuh

ches

chekh

cheh

In Eastern and Central Pahari the verb substantive is formed from the root ach, as in both Rajasthani and Kashmiri. In Rajasthani its present tense, being derived from the Sanskrit present rcchami, I go, does not change for gender. But in Pahari and Kashmiri it must be derived from the rare Sanskrit particle *rcchitas, gone, for in these languages it is a participial tense and does change according to the gender of the subject. Thus, in the singular we have: - Here we have a relic of the old Khasa language, which, as has been said, seems to have been related to Kashmiri. Other relics of Khasa, again agreeing with north-western India, are the tendency to shorten long vowels, the practice of epenthesis, or the modification of a vowel by the one which follows in the next syllable, and the frequent occurrence of disaspiration. Thus, Khas siknu, Kumauni sikno, but Hindi sikhna, to learn; Kumauni yeso, plural yasa, of this kind.

Regarding Western Pahari materials are not so complete. The speakers are not brought into contact with Tibeto-Burman languages, and hence we find no trace of these. But the signs of the influence of north-western languages are, as might be expected, still more apparent than farther east. In some dialects epenthesis is in full swing, as in (Churahi) khata, eating, fern. khaiti. Very interesting is the mixed origin of the postpositions defining the various cases. Thus, while that of the genitive is generally the Rajasthani ro, that of the dative continually points to the west. Sometimes it is the Sindhi khë (see Sindhi). At other times it is jo, where is here a locative of the base of the Sindhi genitive postposition jo. In all Indo-Aryan languages, the dative postposition is by origin the locative of some genitive one. In vocabulary, Western Pahari often employs, for the more common ideas, words which can most readily be connected with the north-western and Piedca groups. (See Indo-Aryan Languages.) LITERATuRE. - Khas-kura has a small literature which has grown up in recent years. We may mention the Birsikka, an anonymous collection of folk-tales, and a Ramayana by Bhanu Bhatta. There are also several translations from Sanskrit. Of late years local scholars have done a good deal towards creating an interest in Central Pahari. Special mention may be made of Ganga Datt Upreti's Proverbs and Folklore of Kumaun and Garhwal (Lodiana, 1894); the same author's Dialects of the Kumaun Division (Almora, 1900); and Jwala Datt Joshi's translation of Dandin's Sanskrit Dasa Kumara Carita (Almora, 1892). A local poet who lived about a century ago, Gumani Kavi by name, was the author of verses written in a peculiar style, and now much admired. Each verse consists of four lines, the first three being in Sanskrit, and the fourth a Hindi or Kumauni proverb. A collection of these, edited by Rewa Datt Upreti, was published in the Indian Antiquary for 1909 (pp. 177 seq.) under the title of Gumani-niti. Western Pahari has no literature. Portions of the Bible have been translated into Khas-kura (under the name of "Nepali"), Kumauni, Garhwali, Jaunsari and Chambiali.

Authorities. - S. H. Kellogg's Hindi Grammar (2nd ed., London, 1893) includes both Eastern and Central Pahari in its survey. For Khas see also A. Turnbull, Nepali, i. e. Gorkhali or Parbate Grammar (Darjeeling, 1904), and G. A. Grierson, "A Specimen of the Khas or Naipali Language," in the Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenleindischen Gesellschaft (1907), lxi. 659 seq. There is no authority dealing with Western Pahari as a whole. A. H. Diack's work, The Kulu Dialect of Hindi (Lahore, 1896), may be consulted for Kuluhi. See also T. Grahame Bailey's Languages of the Northern Himalayas (Royal Asiatic Society, London, 1908). Vol. ix., pt. iv., of the Linguistsc Survey of India contains full particulars of all the Pahari dialects in great detail. (G. A. GR.) Pahlavi, or Pehlevi, the name given by the followers of Zoroaster to the character in which are written the ancient translations of their sacred books and some other works which they preserve (see Persia: Language). The name can be traced back for many centuries; the great epic poet Firdousi (second half of the 10th Christian century) repeatedly speaks of Pahlavi books as the sources of his narratives, and he tells us among other things that in the time of the first Khosrau (Chosroes I., A.D. 53 1 -579) the Pahlavi character alone was used in Persia.' The learned Ibn Mokaffa` (8th century) calls Pahlavi one of the languages of Persia, and seems to imply that it was an official language. 2 We cannot determine what characters, perhaps also dialects, were called Pahlavi before the Arab period. It is most suitable to confine the word, as is now generally done, to designate a kind of writing - not only that of the Pahlavi books, but of all inscriptions on stone and metal which use similar characters and are written on essentially the same principles as these books.

At first sight the Pahlavi books present the strangest spectacle of mixture of speech. Purely Semitic (Aramaic) words - and these not only nouns and verbs, but numerals, particles, demonstrative and even personal pronouns - stand side by side with Persian vocables. Often, however, the Semitic words are compounded in a way quite unsemitic, or have Persian terminations. As read by the modern Zoroastrians, there are also 1 We cannot assume, however, that the poet had a clear idea of what Pahlavi was.

2 The passage, in which useful facts are mixed up with strange notions, is given abridged in Fihrist, p. 13, more fully by Yakut, iii. 925, but most fully and accurately in the unprinted Mafatih al-`olum. many words which are neither Semitic nor Persian; but it is soon seen that this traditional pronunciation is untrustworthy. The character is cursive and very ambiguous, so that, for example, there is but one sign for n, u, and r, and one for y, d, and g, this has led to mistakes in the received pronunciation, which for many words can be shown to have been at one time more correct than it is now. But apart from such blunders there remain phenomena which could never have appeared in a real language; and the hot strife which raged till recently as to whether Pahlavi is Semitic or Persian has been closed by the discovery that it is merely a way of writing Persian in which the Persian words are partly represented - to the eye, not to the ear - by their Semitic equivalents. This view, the development of which began with Westergaard (Zendavesta, p. zo, note), is in full accordance with the true and ancient tradition. Thus Ibn Mokaffa`, who translated many Pahlavi books into Arabic, tells us that the Persians had about one thousand words which they wrote otherwise than they were pronounced in Persian.3 For bread he says they wrote Lhma, i.e. the Aramaic lal nei, but they pronounced nan, which is the common Persian word for bread. Similarly Bsra, the Aramaic besra, flesh, was pronounced as the Persian gosht. We still possess a glossary which actually gives the Pahlavi writing with its Persian pronunciation. This glossary, which besides Aramaic words contains also a variety of Persian words disguised in antique forms, or by errors due to the contracted style of writing, exists in various shapes, all of which, in spite of their corruptions, go back to the work which the statement of Ibn Mokaffa` had in view. 4 Thus the Persians did the same thing on a much larger scale, as when in English we write (libra) and pronounce "pound" or write & or & (et) and pronounce "and." No system was followed in the choice of Semitic forms. Sometimes a noun was written in its status absolutus, sometimes the emphatic d was added, and this was sometimes written as H sometimes as ri. One verb was written in the perfect, another in the imperfect. Even various dialects were laid under contribution. The Semitic signs by which Persian synonyms were distinguished are sometimes quite arbitrary. Thus in Persian khwesh and khwat both mean "self"; the former is written NFShx (nafsha or nafsheh), the latter BNFShx with the preposition be prefixed. Personal pronouns are expressed in the dative (i.e. with prepositional 1 prefixed), thus Lx (lakh) for tu, " thou," LNH (land) for avid, " we." Sometimes the same Semitic sign stands for two distinct Persian words that happen to agree in sound; thus because hana is Aramaic for "this," HNA represents not only Persian e, " this," but also the interjection e, i. e. " 0" as prefixed to a vocative. Sometimes for clearness a Persian termination is added to a Semitic word; thus, to distinguish between the two words for father, pit and pitar, the former is written AB and the latter Abitr. The Persian form is, however, not seldom used, even where there is a quite well-known Semitic ideogram.5 These difficulties of reading mostly disappear when the ideographic nature of the writing is recognized. We do not always know what Semitic word supplied some ambiguous group of letters (e. g. PUN for pa, "to," or HT for agar, "if"); but we always can tell the Persian word - which is the one important thing - though not always the exact pronunciation of it in that older stage of the language which the extant Pahlavi works belong to. In Pahlavi, for example, the word for "female" is written matak, an ancient form which afterwards passed through madhak into madha. But it was a mistake of later ages to fancy that because this was so the sign T also meant D, 3 Fihrist, p. 14, line 13 seq., cf. line 4 seq. The former passage was first cited by Quatremere, Jour. As. (1835), i. 256, and discussed by Clermont-Ganneau, ibid. (1866), i. 430. The expressions it uses are not always clear; perhaps the author of the Fihrist has condensed somewhat.

"Editions by Hoshangji, Jamaspji Asa and M. Haug (Bombay, 1870), and by C. Salemann (Leiden, 1878). See also J. Olshausen," Zur Wiirdigung der Pahlavi-glossare "in Kuhn's Zeit. f. vergl. Sprforsch., N.F., vi. 521 seq.

For examples of various peculiarities see the notes to Noldeke's translation of the story of Artakhshir i Papakan (Gottingen, 1879).

and so to write T for D in many cases, especially in foreign proper names. That a word is written in an older form than that which is pronounced is a phenomenon common to many languages whose literature covers a long period. So in English we still write, though we do not pronounce, the guttural in through, and write laugh when we pronounce laf. Much graver difficulties arise from the cursive nature of the characters already alluded to. There are some groups which may theoretically be read in hundreds of ways; the same little sign may be w, K', n', ru, and the n too may be either h or kh. In older times there was still some little distinction between letters that are now quite identical in form, but even the Egyptian fragments of Pahlavi writing of the 7th century show on the whole the same type as our MSS. The practical inconveniences to those who knew the language were not so great as they may seem; the Arabs also long used an equally ambiguous character without availing themselves of the diacritical points which had been devised long before.

Modern MSS., following Arabic models, introduce diacritical points from time to time, and often incorrectly. These give little help, however, in comparison with the so-called Pazand or transcription of Pahlavi texts, as they are to be spoken, in the character in which the Avesta itself is written, and which is quite clear and has all vowels as well as consonants. The transcription is not philologically accurate; the language is often modernized, but not uniformly so. Pazand MSS. present dialectical variations according to the taste or intelligence of authors and copyists, and all have many false readings. For us, however, they are of the greatest use. To get a conception of Pahlavi one cannot do better than read the Minoi-Khiradh in the Pahlavi with constant reference to the Pazand.' Critical labour is still required to give an approximate reproduction of the author's own pronunciation of what he wrote.

The coins of the later Sassanid kings, of the princes of Tabaristan, and of some governors in the earlier Arab period, exhibit an alphabet very similar to Pahlavi MSS. On the older coins the several letters are more clearly distinguished, and in good specimens of well-struck coins of the oldest Sassanians almost every letter can be recognized with certainty. The same holds good for the inscriptions on gems and other small monuments of the early Sassanian period; but the clearest of all are the rock inscriptions of the Sassanians in the 3rd and 4th centuries, though in the 4th century a tendency to cursive forms begins to appear. Only r and v are always quite alike. The character of the language and the system of writing is essentially the same on coins, gems and rocks as in MSS. - pure Persian, in part strangely disguised in a Semitic garb. In details there are many differences between the Pahlavi of inscriptions and the books. Persian endings added to words written in Semitic form are much less common in the former, so that the person and number of a verb are often not to be made out. There are also orthographic variations; e.g. long a in Persian forms is always expressed in book-Pahlavi, but not always in inscriptions. The unfamiliar contents of some of these inscriptions, their limited number, their bad preservation, and the imperfect way in which some of the most important of them have been published 2 leave many things still obscure in these monuments of Persian kings; but they have done much to clear up both great and small points in the history of Pahlavi.3 Some of the oldest Sassanian inscriptions are accompanied by a text belonging to the same system of writing, but with many variations in detail, 4 and an alphabet which, though derived ' The Book of the Mainyo-i-Khard in the Original Pahlavi, ed. by Fr. Ch. Andreas (Kiel, 1882); idem, The Pazand and Sanskrit Texts, by E. W. West (Stuttgart and London, 1871).

See especially the great work of F. Stolze, Persepolis (2 vols., Berlin, 3882). It was De Sacy who began the decipherment of the inscriptions.

' Thus we now know that the ligature in book-Pahlavi which means" in,"the original letters of which could not be made out, is for between." It is to be read andar. 4 Thus pus, "son," is written '12 instead of m2; pesh, " before," is written nnnip, but in the usual Pahlavi it is from the same source with the other Pahlavi alphabets (the old Aramaic), has quite different forms. This character is also found on some gems and seals. It has been called ChaldaeoPahlavi, &c. Olshausen tries to make it probable that this was the writing of Media and the other that of Persia. The Persian dialect in both sets of inscriptions is identical or nearly so.' The name Pahlavi means Parthian, Pahlav being the regular Persian transformation of the older Parthava. 6 This fact points to the conclusion that the system of writing was developed in Parthian times, when the great nobles, the Pahlavans, ruled and Media was their main seat, "the Pahlav country." Other linguistic, graphical and historical indications point the same way; but it is still far from clear how the system was developed. We know, indeed, that even under the Achaemenids Aramaic writing and speech were employed far beyond the Aramaic lands, even in official documents and on coins. The Iranians had no convenient character, and might borrow the Aramaic letters as naturally as they subsequently borrowed those of the Arabs. But this does not explain the strange practice of writing Semitic words in place of so many Persian words which were to be read as Persian. It cannot be the invention of an individual, for in that case the system would have been more consistently worked out, and the appearance of two or more kinds of Pahlavi side by side at the beginning of the Sassanian period would be inexplicable. But we may remember that the Aramaic character first came to the Iranians from the region of the lower Euphrates and Tigris, where the complicated cuneiform character arose, and where it held its ground long after better ways of writing were known. In later antiquity probably very few Persians could read and write. All kinds of strange things are conceivable in an Eastern character confined to a narrow circle. Of the facts at least there is no doubt.

The Pahlavi literature embraces the translations of the holy books of the Zoroastrians, dating probably from the 6th century, and certain other religious books, especially the Minoi-Khiradh and the Bundahish.' The Bundahish dates from the Arab period. Zoroastrian priests continued to write the old language as a dead tongue and to use the old character long after the victory of a new empire, a new religion, a new form of the language (New Persian), and a new character. There was once a not quite inconsiderable profane literature, of which a good deal is preserved in Arabic or New Persian versions or reproductions, particularly in historical books about the time before Islam. $ Very little profane literature still exists in Pahlavi; the romance of Ardashir has been mentioned above.

See E. W. West's "Pahlavi Literature," in Geiger and Kuhn's Grundriss der iranischen Philologie (1896), vol. ii.; "The Extent, Language and Age of Pahlavi Literature" in Sitzungsber. der k. Akad. der wiss. Phil. u. hist. Klasse (Munich, 1888), pp. 399-443 and his Pahlavi Texts in Sacred Books of the East (1880-1897). The difficult study of Pahlavi is made more difficult by the corrupt state of our copies, due to ignorant and careless scribes.

Of glossaries, that of West (Bombay and London, 3874) is to be recommended; the large Pahlavi, Gujarati and English lexicon of Jamaspji Dastur Minocheherji (Bombay and London, 1877-1882) is very full, but has numerous false or uncertain forms, and must be used with much caution.