Avestan alphabet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Din Dabireh | ||
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| Type: | Alphabet | |
| Languages: | Avestan language | |
| Time period: | Early Middle Ages | |
| Parent writing systems: | Aramaic alphabet Pahlavi script Din Dabireh |
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| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
| History of the Alphabet |
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Middle Bronze Age 19–15th c. BC
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| Meroitic 3rd c. BC |
| Hangul 1443 |
| Zhuyin 1913 |
| Complete genealogy |
The Avestan alphabet, the native name for which is din dabireh or din dabiri, is a writing system developed during the Sassanid era (226-651) to render the Avestan language.
As a side effect of its development, the script was also used to render the Pazend language, a form of Middle Persian that was used primarily for the Zend commentaries on the texts of the Avesta.
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[edit] History
By the early period of Sassanid epoch, the languages of the Avesta had almost ceased to be a understood by the general public, and had been supplanted by Middle Persian as the language of the laity. However, the sacred texts of the Avesta, which had probably been transmitted orally for centuries before then, continued to be recited by all in the Avestan language (and continue to be so to this day).
It is not known what precisely prompted the development of an alphabet for spoken Avestan. It may have been to facilitate the compilation of the Zend commentaries and translations of the Avesta. Alternatively, the need for such an alphabet may have become apparent during the reconstruction of the royal library by Ardashir I (226-241) and Shapur II (309-379), that was said to have been destroyed by the Alexander's troops in 330 BCE (see below).
Din dabireh may not have been the first script used for rendering spoken Avestan. The Arda-Viraf Nameh, a second century semi-religious work, suggests that Avesta texts existed in written form at the time of Alexander's invasion of Persia in 330 BCE. However, those texts have not survived and it is not known what script those texts might have been in.
Immediately prior to the innovation of din dabireh, which probably occurred in the 5th or 6th century CE, the Avestan language was very likely rendered using either the Pahlavi or Parthian script. In the Denkard, a 9th century text, the development of din dabireh is attributed to a Zoroastrian priest named Abarbad Maraspand.
[edit] Genealogy and development
The Pahlavi script, upon which Din dabireh is based, was in common use for representing middle Persian, but was not adequate for representing Avestan since Pahlavi was an abjad syllabry which only contained a handful of consonant characters (most with multiple pronunciations), and left most vowels unexpressed. Pahlavi script had at most 22 characters (the number varied by region and epoch), and as "Book Pahlavi", the most common form of the script, had only 12 characters representing 24 sounds.
In contrast, Din dabireh was a full alphabet, with explicit characters for vowels, and allowed for phonetic disambiguation of allophones. The alphabet included many of the Pahlavi script consonantal characters, to which it assigned inherent vowel sounds (for example, k'→ka), and also added some several more.
Both Pahlavi script and Din dabireh are written right-to-left.
[edit] Graphemes
In total, the Avestan alphabet has 37 consonants and 16 vowels. Later, when writing middle Persian in the script, another consonant was added to it to represent the [l] phoneme that didn't exist in the Avestan languages. There are two main transcription schemes for Avestan, the older style used by Christian Bartholomae, and the newer style used by Karl Hoffmann.
The following list shows the letters as ordered and transcribed by Hoffmann (1996), based on Bartholomae:
Vowels:
- a ā å ā̊ ą ą̇ ə ə̄ e ē o ō i ī u ū
Consonants:
- k x x́ xᵛ g ġ ɣ c j t ϑ d δ t̰ p f b β ŋ ŋ́ ŋᵛ n ń ṇ m m̨ ẏ y w r s z š ž š́ ṣ̌ h
ii and uu represent semi-vocalic glides, which in the Bartholomae system are transcribed as y and w.
[edit] Confusion with Pazend
Din dabireh is sometimes confused with the Pazend language, a reduced form of middle Persian that excluded vocabulary of non-Persian origin. This error is due to a 19th century confusion of the Zend (the commentaries on the Avesta) with the Avesta proper, which resulted in Pazend (literally: language of the Zend) being mistaken for the "language" (Din dabireh script) of the Avesta texts.
[edit] References
- Dhalla, Maneckji Nusservanji (1963). History of Zoroastrianism. Bombay: K.R. Cama Oriental Institute.
- Hoffmann, Karl; Bernhard Forssman (1996). Avestische Laut- und Flexionslehre (in German). Innsbruck: Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft. ISBN 3-85124-652-7.
- Rashed Mohassel, Mohammad Taghi (1382 AP). The Avesta: Praise to Truth and Purity (in Persian). Tehran: Cultural Research Bureau. ISBN 964-379-008-8.
