Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/685

 LITERATURE.] PERSIA G55 lhagas. The differences in declension between Old Persian and Zend are unimportant. Old Persian inscriptions are written in the cuneiform character of the simplest form, known as the &quot;first class.&quot; Most of the inscriptions have besides two translations into the more complicated kinds of cuneiform character of two other languages of the Persian empire. One of these is the Assyrian ; the real nature of the second is still a mystery. The interpretation of the Persian cunei form, the character and dialect of which were equally unknown, was begun by Grotefend, who was followed by Burnouf, Rawlinson, and Oppert. The ancient Persian inscriptions have been collected in a Latin translation with grammar and glossaries by Spiegel (Leipsic, 1862). The other ancient tongues and dialects of this family are known only by name ; we read of peculiar idioms in Sogdiana, Zabulistan, Herat, &c. It is doubtful whether the languages of the Scythians, the Lycians, and the Lydians, of which hardly anything remains, were Iranian or not. After the fall of the Achsemenians there is a period of five centuries, from which no document of the Persian language has come down to us. Under the Arsacids Persian nationality rapidly declined ; all that remains to us from that period namely, the inscriptions on coins is in the Greek tongue. Only towards the end of the Parthian dynasty and after the rise of the Sasanians, under whom the national traditions were again cultivated in Persia, do we recover the lost traces of the Persian language in the Pahlavi inscriptions and literature. UHe 3. Middle Persian. The singular phenomena presented by Pah- emn. lavi writing have been discussed in a separate article (see PAHLAVI). The language which it disguises rather than expresses Middle Persian, as we may call it presents many changes as compared with the Old Persian of the Achsemenians. The abundant gram matical forms of the ancient language are much reduced in number ; the case -ending is lost; the noun has only two inflexions, the singular and the plural ; the cases are expressed by prepositions, e.g., rubdn (the soul), nom. and ace. sing., plur. rubdndn; dat. veil or avo rubdn, abl. min or az rubdn. Even distinctive forms for gender are entirely abandoned, e.g., the pronoun avo signifies &quot;he,&quot; &quot;she,&quot; &quot;it.&quot; In the verb compound forms predominate. In this respect Middle Persian is almost exactly similar to New Persian. ^e 4. j T ew Persian. The last step in the development of the lan- Peian. guage is New Persian, represented in its oldest form by Firdausi. In grammatical forms it is still poorer than Middle Persian ; except English, no Indo-European language has so few inflexions, but this is made up for by the subtle development of the syntax. The structure of New Persian has hardly altered at all since the Shdh- ndma ; but the original purism of Firdausi, who made every effort to keej) the language free from Semitic admixture, could not long be maintained. Arabic literature and speech exercised so powerful an influence on New Persian, especially on the written language, that it could not withstand the admission of an immense number of Semitic words. There is no Arabic word which would be refused acceptance in good Persian. But, nevertheless, New Persian has remained a language of genuine Iranian stock. Among the changes of the sound system in New Persian, as con trasted with earlier periods, especially with Old Persian, the first that claims mention is the change of the tenues k, t, p, c, into g, d, b. z. Thus we have Old Persian or Zend. Pahlavi. New Persian. mahrka (death) mark marg Thraetaona Fritun Feridun ap (water) ap ab hvato (self) khot khod raucah (day) roj ruz haca aj, az. aca a , az. A series of consonants often disappear in the spirant ; thus Pahlavi. New Persian. kof koh gris gah cihar Old Persian or Zend. kaufa (mountain) athu (place), Z. gatu , cathware (four) baiidaka (slave) spada (army) dadami (I give) banduk bandah sipah diham. Old d and dh frequently become y New Persian. mai boi pai kai. Old Persian or Zend. madhu (wine) baodho (consciousness) padha (foot) kadha (when) Old y often appears as j : Zend ydma (glass), New Persian jam ; y avan (a youth), New Persian javdn. Two consonants are not allowed to stand together at the beginning of a word ; hence vowels are frequently inserted or prefixed, e.g., New Persian sitddan or istddan (to stand), root std ; birddar (brother), Zend and Pahlavi brdtar. l 1 Grammars of New Persian, by Lumsden (Calcutta, 1820), Chodzko (Paris, 1852), Vullers (Giessen, 1870). For the New Persian dialects see Fr. Miiller, in the Sitzungsber. der Wien. AJcad., vols. Ixxvii., Ixxviii. Amongst modern languages and dialects other than Persian which Modern must be also assigned to the Iranian family may be mentioned dialects. 1. Kurdish, a language nearly akin to New Persian, with which it has important characteristics in common. It is chiefly dis tinguished from it by a marked tendency to shorten words at all costs, e.g., Kurd, berd (brother) New Persian birddar ; Kurd, dim (I give) = New Persian diham ; Kurd, spi (white) = New Persian siped. 2. Baluch, the language of Baluchistan, also very closely akin to New Persian, but especially distinguished from it in that all the old spirants are changed into explosives, e.g., Baluch vdb (sleep) = Zend hvafna; Baluch kap (slime) = Zend kof a, New Persian kof; Baluch hapt (seven ) = New Persian haft. 3. Ossetic, true Iranian, in spite of its resemblance in sound to the Georgian. 2 4. Afghan, which has certainly been increasingly influenced by the neighbouring Indian languages in inflexion, syntax, and vocabu lary, but is still at bottom a pure Iranian language, not merely intermediate between Iranian and Indian. The position of Armenian alone remains doubtful. Some scholars attribute it to the Iranian family ; others prefer to regard it as a separate and independent member of the Indo-European group. Many words that at first sight seem to prove its Iranian origin are only adopted from the Persian. 3 (K. G. ) SECTION II. MODERN PERSIAN LITERATURE. Persian historians are greatly at variance about the origin of their national poetry. Most of them go back to the 5th Christian century and ascribe to one of the Sasanian kings, Bahramgur or Bahram V. (420-439), the invention of metre and rhyme ; others mention as author of the first Persian poem a certain Abulhafs of Soghd, near Samarkand. In point of fact, there is no doubt that the later Sasanian rulers fostered the literary spirit of their nation (see PAHLAVI). Pahlavi books, however, fall outside of the present subject, which is the literature of the idiom which shaped itself out of the older Persian speech by slight modifications and a steadily increasing mixture of Arabic words and phrases in the 9th and 10th centuries of our era, and which in all essential respects has remained the same for the last thousand years. The national spirit of Iran, although smothered and stifled by the Arab con quest, could not be entirely annihilated. The system of centralization was at no time very strong in the extensive dominions of the Omayyad and Abbasid dynasties ; and the more their power and influence decayed the more they lost their hold on Persia, especially since the native element began to aspire to governorships and to take the political management into its own hand. The death of Harun al-Rashid in the beginning of the 9th century, which marks the commencement of the decline of the caliphate, was at the same time the starting-point of movements for national independence and a national litera ture in the Iranian dominion, and the common cradle of the two was in the province of Khorasdn, between the Oxus and Jaxartes. In Merv, a Khorasanian town, a certain Abbas composed in 809 A.D. (193 A.H.), accord- ing to the oldest biographical writer of Persia, Mohammed Aufi, the first real poem in modern Persian, in honour of the Abbasid prince Ma mun, Harun al-Eashid s son, who had himself a strong predilection for Persia, his mother s native country, and was, moreover, thoroughly imbued with the freethinking spirit of his age. Soon after this, in 820 (205 A.H.), Tcihir, who aided Ma mun to wrest the caliphate from his brother Amin, succeeded in establishing the first semi-independent Persian dynasty in Khorasan, which was overthrown in 872 (259 A.H.) by the family of the Saffa- rids, founded by Ya kiib b. Laith, originally a brazier in Sistan or ZabulistAn. The development of Persian poetry under these first native dynasties was slow. Arabic language and literature had gained too firm a footing to be supplanted at once 2 Compare Hiibschmann, in Kulm s Zeitschrift, xxiv. 396. 3 Compare P. de Lagarde, Armenische Studien (Gottingen, 1877) ; H. Hiibschmann, Ar-menische Studien (Leipsic, 1883). Earliest modern