Avestan alphabet
Encyclopedia : A : AV : AVE : Avestan alphabet
| History of the Alphabet |
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Middle Bronze Age 19–15th c. BC
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| Meroitic 3rd c. BC |
| Complete genealogy |
History
By the early period of Sassanid Persia, Avestan 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 2nd 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.
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. Its development has been attributed to a Zoroastrian priest named Abarbad Maraspand.
Both Pahlavi script and Din dabireh are written right-to-left.
Graphemes
In total, Din dabireh has 37 consonants and 16 vowels[[Citing sources citation needed]]. The grapheme inventory of Din dabireh is usually transliterated as follows:Vowels:
- a ā ə ə̄ e ē o ō å ą i ī u ū
- k g γ x xw č ǰ t d δ ϑ t̰ p b β f ŋ ŋw ṇ ń n m r s z š ṣ̌ z h
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.References
See also
External links
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