Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/683

 LANGUAGE.] in conjunction with the Persian land telegraph system and the Bushahr-Karachi line. 1 The Sistan mission, under Major-General (afterwards Sir Fred eric) Goldsmid, left England in August 1870, and reached Tehran on 3d October. Thence it proceeded to Ispahan, from which city it moved to Baluchistan, instead of seeking its original destina tion. Difficulties had arisen both in arranging the preliminaries to arbitration and owing to the disordered state of Afghanistan, and it was therefore deemed advisable to commence operations by set tling a frontier dispute between Persia and the Kelat state. Unfor tunately, the obstructions thrown in the way of this settlement by the Persian commissioner, the untoward appearance at Bampur of an unexpected body of Kelatis, and the absence of definite instructions marred the fulfilment of the programme sketched out ; but a line of boundary was proposed, which has since been accepted by the litigants, and which, except perhaps in the case of a small district on the north, has, it is believed, been generally respected. In the following year the same mission, accompanied by the same Persian commissioner, proceeded to Sistan, where it remained for more than five weeks, prosecuting its inquiries, until joined by another mis sion from India, under Major -General (afterwards Sir Richard) Pollock, accompanying the Afghan commissioner. Complications then ensued by the determined refusal of the two native officials to meet in conference ; and the arbitrator had no course available but to take advantage of the notes already obtained on the spot, and return with them to Tehran, there to deliver his decision. This was done on 19th August 1872. The contending parties appealed to the British secretary of state for foreign affairs, as provided by previous understanding ; but the decision held good, and was event ually accepted on both sides (see above, p. 619). The Russo- Persian boundary question of 1881 might have been considered to belong to history, but has been treated elsewhere. It is, however, a strictly pacific arrangement, and has nothing in common with the treaties of Gulistan or Turkmanchai. Mr Alison died at Tehran in April 1872. Mr Ranald Thomson, whose experience of Persia is of thirty-five years duration, then 653 became charge d affaires, and held the post until relieved by his brother, Mr (since Sir) Taylour Thomson from Chili. On the re tirement of the latter in April 1879, Mr (sinceSir Ranald) Thomson succeeded as envoy. During the later years of the reign of Nasru d- Din several Englishmen have distinguished themselves as explorers in the north-cast. Among them the names of O Donovan, Napier, Baker, Gill, Clayton, and Stewart will be readily remembered. Colonels Bateman-Champain, Murdoch Smith, Sir Oliver St John, Beresford Lovett, and the late Major Pierson, all engineer officers connected with the telegraph, have made their mark in the country. Nasru d-Di n Shah, unlike his predecessors, has paid two visits to Europe, one in 1873 and one in 1879. On the first occasion only he extended his journey to England, and was then attended by his &quot;sadr azim,&quot; or prime minister, the late Mirza Husain Khan, an able and enlightened adviser, withal a Grand Cross of the Star of India. His second visit was to Russia, Germany, France, and Austria, but he did not cross the Channel. Among the shah s latest projects are the possession of a little fleet in the Persian Gulf, and of some vessels on the Kart in. In 1884 it was stated that a thousand-ton steamer (the &quot; Persepolis&quot;) and a smaller one for river navigation were actually in course of construction. The route by the Karun was to be opened, and a carriageable road constructed from Shustar to Tehran, via Dizful, Khuramabad, Buriijird, Sultanabad, and Kum. Orders had been given for building two tugs to pull native craft up the Karun. The arrangements for the road, transport, and administration from Muhamrah to Tehran were confided to General Houtum Schindler, the inspector-general of Persian telegraphs. 2 The works which have been mainly followed and quoted in the above his torical sketch arc Sir John Malcolm s History of Persia ; the more modern histories by Robert Grant Watson and Clements Markham ; the Travels of Venetians in Persia, edited by Lord Stanley of Alderley, printed for the Hakluyt Society (1873) ; and the History of the late Revolutions in Persia, taken from the memoirs of Father Krusinski, procurator of the Jesuits at Ispahan (1733). Those which have contributed information in a minor degree are Lady Shell s Diary in Persia; Erskine s Bubar ; Chardin s Travels, annotated by Langles ; Professor Creasy s History of the Ottoman Turks; Ferrier s History of the Afghans ; Telegraph and Travel (1874) ; and others mentioned in the footnotes. (F. J. G.) PART III LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. SECTION I. PERSIAN (IRANIAN) LANGUAGES. Under the name of Persian is included the whole of that great family of languages occupying a field nearly coincident with the modern Iran, of which true Persian is simply the western division. It is therefore common and more correct to speak of the Iranian family. The original native name of the race which spoke these tongues was Arian. King Darius is called on an inscriptioi &quot;a Persian, son of a Persian, an Arian of Arian race&quot; ; and the followers of the Zoroastrian religion in their earliest records never give them selves any other title but Airyavo danghavo, that is to say, &quot; Arian races.&quot; The province of the Iranian language is bounded on the west by the Semitic, on the north and north-east by the Ural-altaic or Turanian, and on the south-east by the kindred language of India. The Iranian family of languages is one of the seven great branches of the Indo-European stem, and was first recognized as such by Sir William Jones and Friedrich Schlegel. Whatever uncertainty still remains as to the exact relationship between all the several branches of the Indo-European family, it is at least certain that Indian and Persian belong together more closely than the rest, and that they continued to develop side by side for a long period after the other branches had been already severed from the parent stem. The common characteristics of all Iranian languages, which dis tinguish them especially from Sanskrit, are as follows. (1) Change of the original s into the spirant h. Thus Sanskrit. sindhu (Indus) sarva (all) sama (whole) santi (sunt) Zend. hindu haurva hama henti Old Persian. hindu haruva hama hantiy (2) Change of the original aspirates gh, dh, bJi ( = corresponding medials Sanskrit. bhumi (earth) dhita (0er6j) ghanna (heat) Zend. bumi data garema Old Persian. bumi data garma (3) Ic, t, p before a consonant are changed into th, / Sanskrit. Zend. Old Persian. prathaina (first) fratema fratama kratu (insight) khratu .... (4) The development of soft sibilants New Persian. hind bar ham hend. X, 6, &amp;lt;/&amp;gt;) into the New Persian. bum dad garm. the spirants Teh, New Persian. fradum (Parsi) khirad. 1 The Indo-European Telegraph Company have now (1884), on rather more than 450 miles of wire, from Julfa on the Arras to Tehran, in what is called the &quot;Maintenance Department,&quot; six stations with fifteen employes; the &quot;com mercial &quot; stations, with twenty employes, are at Tabriz and Tehran only. The Persian telegraph system, under British officers, has fourteen stations in all, the chief being at Tehran, Ispahan, Shiraz, and Bushahr. The official staff numbers between thirty-five and forty. The number of paid words passing through these lines has steadily increased from 305,485 in 1877 to 1,177,412 in 1883. The average time taken by a message from London to Calcutta via Tehran varies from one and a half to two and a half hours. Sanskrit. Asuro Medhas 3 balm (arm) hima (hiems) Zend. Ahuro Mazdao bazu zima Old Persian. Auramazda Nev: Persian. Ormuzd bazu zim. Our knowledge of the Iranian languages in older periods is too fragmentary to allow of our giving a complete account of this family and of its special historical development. It will be sufficient here to distinguish the main types of the older and the more recent periods. From antiquity we have sufficient knowledge of two dialects, the first belonging to eastern Iran, the second to western. 1. Zend, or Old Bactrian. Neither of these two titles is well Zend, chosen. The name Old Bactrian suggests that the language was limited to the small district of Bactria, or at least that it was spoken there, which is, at the most, only an hypothesis. Zend, again (originally dzaintisK), is not the name of a language, as Anquetil Duperron supposed, but means &quot;interpretation&quot; or &quot;explanation,&quot; and is specially applied to the mediaeval Pahlavi translation of the Avcsta. Our &quot; Zend-Avesta &quot; does not mean the Avcsta in the Zend language, but is an incorrect transcription of the original expression &quot; Avistak va zand,&quot; i.e., &quot;the holy text (Avcsta} together with the translation.&quot; But, since we still lack sure data to fix the home of this language with any certainty, the convenient name of Zend has become generally established in Europe, and may be provisionally retained. But the home of the Zend language was certainly in eastern Iran ; all attempts to seek it farther west e.g., in Media 4 must be regarded as failures. Zend is the language of the so-called Avcsta,^ the holy book of the Persians, containing the oldest documents of the religion of Zoroaster. Besides this important monument, which is about twice as large as the Iliad and Odyssey put together, we only possess very scanty relics of the Zend language in mediaeval glosses and scattered quotations in Pahlavi books. These remains, however, suffice to give a complete insight into the structure of the language. Not only amongst Iranian languages but amongst all the languages of the Indo-European group, Zend takes one of the very highest places in 2 In the transcription of proper names in Part II. an endeavour to render the pronunciation current in Persia has caused the modification of the more conventional, and perhaps the more strictly correct, mode elsewhere followed in this work. On this principle it is that the c is replaced by i and a, and the o by u, as in Makran forMekran, Rigan for Regan, Khurasan for Khorasan, &c. In Arabic words, however, the w is not exchanged for v, nor is the y necessarily used for the (_f, except where the repetition of i would be confusing, as in saiyid. As a general rule the system of spelling Indian words, accepted for official correspondence, has been applied to the transliteration of Persian. When a final a is not accented it represents dh, as kara for karah, and so forth. 3 Name of the supreme god of the Persians. 4 Cp. I. Darmesteter, Etudes Iraniennes, i. 10 (Paris, 1883). 5 As was said above, this, and not Zend-Avesta, is the correct title for the original text of the Persian Bible. The origin of the word is doubtful, and we cannot point to it before the time of the Sasanians. Perhaps it means &quot;announcement,&quot; &quot;revelation.&quot;