Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics

Jared Klein, Brian Joseph, Matthias Fritz, Mark Wenthe

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110393248
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book presents the most comprehensive coverage of the field of Indo-European Linguistics in a century, focusing on the entire Indo-European family and treating each major branch and most minor languages. The collaborative work of 120 scholars from 22 countries, Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics combines the exhaustive coverage of an encyclopedia with the in-depth treatment of individual monographic studies.

VI.Iranian

32.The documentation of Iranian

1.Time and place

2.Old Iranian dialects

3.Old Persian and Median

4.Avestan and the Avesta

5.The Avestan script

6.Avestan manuscripts

7.The oral Avestan text

8.Middle Iranian

9.New Iranian

10.Texts and grammatical descriptions

11.References

1.Time and place

Iranian languages are known from three linguistic-chronological periods commonly referred to as Old, Middle, and New or Modern Iranian.

Old Iranian constitutes the earliest manifestation of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subgroup of Indo-European and comprises Old and Young Avestan and Old Persian. The Avestan languages were presumably spoken in the late 2nd and early 1st millennia BCE in Central Asia and the area of modern Afghanistan and Sistan, which constitute the geographical horizons of the Young Avesta. Old Persian was the language of the Persian population settled in southern Iran (area of modern Fārs) and is attested in inscriptions of Achaemenid kings datable from 522/521 to ca. 350 BCE.

Middle Iranian languages are known from a large variety of sources from the third century CE and into the Muslim period (from the 7th century in the west to the 11th− 12th centuries in the east).

New Iranian languages are all from the Islamic period, but few of them have long literary traditions. New Persian is known from the 8th century, Gurani from the 14th, and Pashto from the 16th (Skjærvø 2006c).

2.Old Iranian dialects

The Iranians separated from their Indian relatives, perhaps about the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE, and individual Iranian tribes developed as the population expanded west and east. In the 2nd and early 1st millennia BCE, Old Iranian languages were probably spoken from north of the Black Sea to modern Tajikistan, perhaps even modern Xinjiang. By around 1000 BCE, some tribes had migrated onto the Iranian Plateau, where the presence of Parsuwas and Mātai in northwestern Iran and, later, farther south, is recorded in the Assyrian dynastic annals from the 9th and 8th centuries (Waters 1999).

Several of these tribes are known from the Achaemenid inscriptions and the Greek historians, as well as from the Young Avesta. Over the entire northern stretch we find Scythians/Sakas; in the area of the modern Central Asian republics and Afghanistan, Choresmians, Sogdians, Bactrians, and others; and, on the Iranian Plateau, Parthians, Medes, and Persians. All of these are known from literary remains.

Iranian languages have traditionally been divided into two geographical groups, (South-)Western and (North-)Eastern, a division based on the Middle Persian and Parthian texts discovered at Turfan and confirmed by modern dialects (Tedesco 1921). With the discoveries of additional Middle Iranian languages and further study of the modern dialects, this classification has become less useful.

Another classification is based on the developments of the palatal affricates *ć and *ȷ́ and the groups *ću̯ and *ȷ́u̯ (see Schmitt 1989: 27−28), which define three dialect areas:

−Southwestern Iranian, where *ć and *ȷ́ merged with θ and d and *ću̯ and *ȷ́u̯ with s and z, comprises the “Perside” dialects in the area of ancient Pārsa, modern Fārs, including Old, Middle, and Modern Persian.

−Northeastern Iranian, where *ć and *ȷ́ merged with s and z but *ću̯ and *ȷ́u̯ with ś and ź, include Khotanese and modern Wakhi.

−Central Iranian, where *ć and *ȷ́ merged with s and z and *ću̯ and *ȷ́u̯ with sp and zb, comprises all the other languages and dialects.

Northwestern Iranian, represented by the Alanic dialects and modern Ossetic, shares the Central isoglosses, but is also characterized by the early developments of internal ry to l and, later, initial p to f.

Other dialect isoglosses can be established on the basis of morphology and lexicon.

3.Old Persian and Median

Old Persian is the only Old Iranian language documented by contemporary texts and the only one known from two later stages (Middle, and New Persian). It was written in a cuneiform script devised under Darius I to record his deeds in the manner of contemporary kings. The trilingual Bisotun inscription is the longest Old Persian text and also provided the key to deciphering the other Ancient Near Eastern cuneiform inscriptions. The remaining corpus consists of shorter inscriptions by Darius I and his son and successor Xerxes. Later inscriptions are few and bear witness to a post-Old Persian or proto-Middle Persian stage of Persian (Skjærvø 2002).

Median is known only from numerous non-Persian forms in Old Persian, e.g. aspa beside OP. asa ‘horse’. Old Persian and Median loan words are also found in Aramaic (Greenfield 1986), Elamite (cited ra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• I. General and methodological issues
• II. The application of the comparative method in selected language groups other than Indo-European
• III. Historical perspectives on Indo-European linguistics
• IV. Anatolian
• V. Indic
• VI. Iranian
• VII. Greek