Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/150

 134 P A G P A H fellow missionary to Abyssinia, but having fallen into the hands of pirates at Ormuz he was detained in that neighbourhood for seven years as a galley slave. Having been redeemed by his order in 1596, he next spent some years in mission work at Diu and Camboya and other places on the west coast of India, and it was not until 1603 that he reached his original destination, landing at the port of Massowah. At the headquarters of his order in Fremona, he soon acquired the two chief dialects of the country, translated a catechism, and set about the educa tion of some Abyssinian children. He also established a reputation as a preacher, and, having been summoned to court, succeeded in vanquishing the native priests and in converting Za-Denghel, the king, who wrote to the pope and the king of Spain for more missionaries, an act of zeal which involved him in civil war, and ultimately cost him his life (October 1604). Under the succeeding sovereign the influence of Paez became still greater, not only the king but the nobility having abjured Paganism and accepted Christianity. Paez, who is said to have been the first European to visit the Abyssinian Nile, died of fever in 1622. See ABYSSINIA, vol. i. p. 65. PAGANINI, NICOLO (1784-1840), the most extra ordinary of executants on the violin, past or present, was born at Genoa, February 18, 1784. His father, a clever amateur, imbued him with a taste for music at a very early age. He first appeared in public at Genoa, in 1793, with triumphant success. In 1795 he visited Parma for the purpose of taking lessons from A. Eolla, who, however, said that he had nothing to teach him. On returning home, he studied more diligently than ever, practising single passages for ten hours at a time, and publishing compositions so difficult that he alone could play them. After spending some years in close retirement, he started, in 1805, on a tour through Europe, astonishing the world with his matchless performances on the fourth string alone. In 1827 the pope honoured him with the Order of the Golden Spur.; and, in the following year, he extended his travels to Germany, beginning with Vienna, where he created a profound sensation. He first appeared in Paris in 1831 ; and on June 3 in that year he played in London, at the King s Theatre. His visit to England was preluded by the most absurd and romantic stories. He was described as a political victim who had been immured for twenty years in a dungeon, where he played all day long upon- an old broken violin with one string, and thus gained his wonderful mechanical dexterity. The result of this and other foolish reports was that he could not walk the streets without being mobbed. Here, as in other countries, he amassed a princely fortune, notwithstanding enormous losses caused by his unhappy propensity for speculation. In 1834 Berlioz composed for him his beautiful symphony, Harold en Italie. He was then at the zenith of his fame ; but his health, long since ruined by excessive study, declined rapidly. In 1838 he suffered serious losses in Paris, yet generously presented Berlioz with 20,000 francs in return for his symphony. The disasters of this year increased his malady laryngeal phthisis and, after much suffering, he died at Nice, May 27, 1840. Paganini s style was impressive and passionate to the last degree. His cantabile passages moved his audience to tears, while his tours de force were so astonishing that a Viennese amateur publicly declared that he had seen the devil assisting him. No later violinist has as yet eclipsed his fame as an exe cutant, though he was far from realizing the artistic perfection so nobly maintained by Spohr and Joachim. The best of his imitators was his pupil Sivori. PAHLAVl, or PEHLEVI, the name given by the fol lowers of Zoroaster to the character in which are written the ancient translations of their sacred books and some other works which they preserve. The name can be traced back for many centuries ; the great epic poet Firdausi (second half of the 10th Christian century) repeatedly speaks of Pahlavf books as the sources of his narratives, and he tells us among other things that in the time of the first Khosrau (Chosroes I., 531-579 A.D.) the Pahlavf character alone was used in Persia. 1 The learned Ibn MokanV (8th century) calls Pahlavf one of the languages of Persia, and seems to imply that it was an official language. 2 We cannot deter mine 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 Pahlavf 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 many words which are neither Semitic nor Persian ; but it is soon seen that this tradi tional 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 ?/, &amp;lt;7, and // ; this has led to mistakes in the received pronunciation, which for many words can be shewn 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 AVester- gaard (Zendavesta, p. 20, 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 lahmd, but they pronounced nan, which is the common Persian word for bread. Similarly BSRA, the Aramaic besrd, fle.sh, was pronounced as the Persian cjosht. 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 con tracted 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 MokanV 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 &quot; pound &quot; or write 6 or & (et) and pronounce &quot;and.&quot; No system was followed in the choice of Semitic forms. Sometimes 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 imprinted Mafdt Ji al- olum. 3 Fihrist, p. 14, 1. 13 sq., comp. 1. 4 sq. 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. 4 Editions by Hoshangji and Haug (Bombay, 1870), and by Sale- mann (Leyden, 1878). See also J. Olshausen, &quot; Zur Wtirdigung der Pahlavi-glossare &quot; in Kuhn s Zcit. f. veryl. Sprforsch., N. F., vi. 521 sq.