A Critical look at Perso-Arabic Orthography in Zoroastrian Middle Persian Manuscripts

Shahidi, Ali; Shafiei, Ibrahim

doi:10.22059/jlcr.2024.379610.2008

A Critical look at Perso-Arabic Orthography in Zoroastrian Middle Persian Manuscripts

Document Type : scientific-research

Authors

Ali Shahidi ¹

Ibrahim Shafiei ²

¹ Assistant Professor of Department of Ancient Iranian Culture and Languages, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

² . Ph.D. Candidate of Ancient Iranian Culture and Languages, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

10.22059/jlcr.2024.379610.2008

Abstract

Following the Muslims' invasion and consequently spreading the Arabic language and script, the Iranian Muslims in the early centuries, in some of their Arabic writings, used to account the expressions and/or sentences from (Middle- or Early Neo-) Persian, but Zoroastrians and Christians continued to use the Pahlavi script for a few centuries after, and apparently the Iranian Jews also wrote (Middle- or Early Neo-) Persian with their Hebrew-Aramaic script and all of the Iranians have not abandoned the previous writing tradition in a coordinated period of time. Here, some contemporary reflections of the linguistic neighborhood of the Pahlavi writing tradition besides the Arabic tradition have been examined and an attempt has been made to bring these reflections together for the first time in order to obtain a clearer view of this phenomenon. In this research, in particular, the writing in Persian by Muslims, the Arabic Ideograms, the Arabic loanwords, the Arabo-Islamic names rendered into Pahlavi, as well as the transformation of the Pahlavi Proper Nouns written in the Arabic or Arabo-Persian writings, based on their orthography, have been discussed. This study shows although since the beginning of the Islamic era, few Arabic words have found their way into Pahlavi literature, this process has continued and even led to the creation of few Arabic ideograms in Frahang ī Pahlawīg. Writing some words in Perso-Arabic script has led to the creation of new words, which is one of the challenges faced by Iranians both in reading past writings in Pahlavi script and transforming into Perso-Arabic script. The process of writing in Perso-Arabic script has had a special impact on Zoroastrian culture of writing, and despite the persistence in using their script from the early period onwards, the language and then in recent times, the script has also changed to Perso-Arabic.

Keywords

Pahlavi

Zoroastrian codicology

Ideogram

Farsigraphy

orthography

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