again agreeing with north-western India, are the tendency to shorten
long vowels, the practice of epenthesis, or the modification of a vowel
by the one which follows in the next syllable, and the frequent occurrence
of disaspiration. Thus, Khas siknu, Kumauni siknō, but
Hindi sīkhnā, to learn; Kumauni yēsō, plural yāsā, of this kind.
Regarding Western Pahari materials are not so complete. The speakers are not brought into contact with Tibeto-Burman languages, and hence we find no trace of these. But the signs of the influence of north-western languages are, as might be expected, still more apparent than farther east. In some dialects epenthesis is in full swing, as in (Churāhi) khā̃tā, eating, fem. khaīti. Very interesting is the mixed origin of the postpositions defining the various cases. Thus, while that of the genitive is generally the Rajasthani rō, that of the dative continually points to the west. Sometimes it is the Sindhi khē (see Sindhi). At other times it is jō, where is here a locative of the base of the Sindhi genitive postposition jō. In all Indo-Aryan languages, the dative postposition is by origin the locative of some genitive one. In vocabulary, Western Pahari often employs, for the more common ideas, words which can most readily be connected with the north-western and Piśāca groups. (See Indo-Aryan Languages.)
Literature.—Khas-kura has a small literature which has grown up in recent years. We may mention the Birsikkā, an anonymous collection of folk-tales, and a Rāmāyana by Bhānu Bhaṭṭa. There are also several translations from Sanskrit. Of late years local scholars have done a good deal towards creating an interest in Central Pahari. Special mention may be made of Ganga Datt Upreti's Proverbs and Folklore of Kumaun and Garhwal (Lodiana, 1894); the same author's Dialects of the Kumaun Division (Almora, 1900); and Jwala Datt Joshi's translation of Danḍiṇ's Sanskrit Daśa Kumāra Carita (Almora, 1892). A local poet who lived about a century ago, Gumānī Kavi by name, was the author of verses written in a peculiar style, and now much admired. Each verse consists of four lines, the first three being in Sanskrit, and the fourth a Hindi or Kumauni proverb. A collection of these, edited by Rewa Datt Upreti, was published in the Indian Antiquary for 1909 (pp. 177 seq.) under the title of Gumānī-nītī. Western Pahari has no literature. Portions of the Bible have been translated into Khas-kura (under the name of “Nepali”), Kumauni, Garhwali, Jaunsari and Chambiali.
Authorities.—S. H. Kellogg's Hindi Grammar (2nd ed., London, 1893) includes both Eastern and Central Pahari in its survey. For Khas see also A. Turnbull, Nepalī, i.e. Gorkhali or Parbate Grammar (Darjeeling, 1904), and G. A. Grierson, “A Specimen of the Khas or Naipālī Language,” in the Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft (1907), lxi. 659 seq. There is no authority dealing with Western Pahari as a whole. A. H. Diack's work, The Kulu Dialect of Hindi (Lahore, 1896), may be consulted for Kuluhi. See also T. Grahame Bailey's Languages of the Northern Himalayas (Royal Asiatic Society, London, 1908). Vol. ix., pt. iv., of the Linguistic Survey of India contains full particulars of all the Pahari dialects in great detail.
PAHLAVĪ, or Pehlevi, the name given by the followers of Zoroaster to the character in which are written the ancient translations of their sacred books and some other works which they preserve (see Persia: Language). The name can be traced back for many centuries; the great epic poet Firdousī (second half of the 10th Christian century) repeatedly speaks of Pahlavī books as the sources of his narratives, and he tells us among other things that in the time of the first Khosrau (Chosroes I., A.D. 531-579) the Pahlavī character alone was used in Persia.[1] The learned Ibn Moḳaffa‘ (8th century) calls Pahlavī one of the languages of Persia, and seems to imply that it was an official language.[2] We cannot determine what characters, perhaps also dialects, were called Pahlavī 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 Pahlavī 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 Pahlavī 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 traditional 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 y, d, and g, this has led to mistakes in the received pronunciation, which for many words can be shown 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 Pahlavī 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 Westergaard (Zendavesta, p. 20, note), is in full accordance with the true and ancient tradition. Thus Ibn Moḳaffa‘, who translated many Pahlavī 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 laḥmā, but they pronounced nān, which is the common Persian word for bread. Similarly BSRA, the Aramaic besrā, flesh, was pronounced as the Persian gōsht. We still possess a glossary which actually gives the Pahlavī 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 contracted 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 Moḳaffa‘ 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 “pound” or write & or & (et) and pronounce “and.” No system was followed in the choice of Semitic forms. Sometimes a noun was written in its status absolutus, sometimes the emphatic â was added, and this was sometimes written as א sometimes as ה. One verb was written in the perfect, another in the imperfect. Even various dialects were laid under contribution. The Semitic signs by which Persian synonyms were distinguished are sometimes quite arbitrary. Thus in Persian khwēsh and khwat both mean “self”; the former is written NFShH (nafshā or nafsheh), the latter BNFShH with the preposition bĕ prefixed. Personal pronouns are expressed in the dative (i.e. with prepositional l prefixed), thus LK (lakh) for tu, “thou,” LNH for amā, “we.” Sometimes the same Semitic sign stands for two distinct Persian words that happen to agree in sound; thus because hānā is Aramaic for “this,” HNA represents not only Persian ē, “this,” but also the interjection ē, i.e. “O” as prefixed to a vocative. Sometimes for clearness a Persian termination is added to a Semitic word; thus, to distinguish between the two words for father, pit and pitar, the former is written AB and the latter ABITR. The Persian form is, however, not seldom used, even where there is a quite well-known Semitic ideogram.[5]
These difficulties of reading mostly disappear when the ideographic nature of the writing is recognized. We do not always know what Semitic word supplied some ambiguous group of letters (e.g. PUN for pa, “to,” or HT for agar, “if”); but we always can tell the Persian word—which is the one important thing—though not always the exact pronunciation of it in that older stage of the language which the extant Pahlavī works belong to. In Pahlavī, for example, the word for “female” is written mātak, an ancient form which afterwards passed through mādhak into mādha. But it was a mistake of later ages to fancy that because this was so the sign T also meant D,
- ↑ We cannot assume, however, that the poet had a clear idea of what Pahlavī was.
- ↑ The passage, in which useful facts are mixed up with strange notions, is given abridged in Fihrist, p. 13, more fully by Yaḳüt, iii. 925, but most fully and accurately in the unprinted Mafātiḥ al-‘olūm.
- ↑ Fihrist, p. 14, line 13 seq., cf. line 4 seq. The former passage was first cited by Quatremère, 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.
- ↑ Editions by Hoshangjī, Jamaspjī Asa and M. Haug (Bombay, 1870), and by C. Salemann (Leiden, 1878). See also J. Olshausen, “Zur Würdigung der Pahlavī-glossare” in Kuhn's Zeit. f. vergl. Sprforsch., N.F., vi. 521 seq.
- ↑ For examples of various peculiarities see the notes to Nöldeke's translation of the story of Artakhshīr i Pāpakān (Göttingen, 1879).
