Lexicographers speak of five other languages in the list of
Persian idioms, thus making seven. To these seven mentioned
in the preface to the Farhang Jeh^ngiri, Von Hammer
adds five, completing the number of dialects known
in the empire of Iran. They are as follows :
1. Pehlvi, the western dialect,, the most ancient. .
2. Deri,* the oldest eastern dialect knownjjhe language
of the court of Ghizni.
3. The dialect of Khorasan, especially of Herat and Tous.
4. Soghdi^ the idiom of Transoxiana, of Samarkand, and
- "ZSoghad.
5. Begzi, the dialect of Sedjistan. This is, according
to Von Hammer, the idiom of the Belu’chesj or
—natives of Bel&ehistan.
6. Zawouli, in Zawoulistan, or Zabulistan.
7. Parsi, originally the dialect of the province* of Fars.f
This is the basis of the modern Persian. &
8. Khowaresmi, spoken in—Khowaresm, especially at
Khiva.
9. Ghilani, in Gliilan.
10. Kazwini, inKazwin. .
11. Kermani, inKerman.
12. Tabarist§ni, in Tabaristan.J |
« Two languages, spoken by principal nations oftC the
borders of Persia, namely, the language of the Kurds and
that of the Afghans, cannot be termed Persian dialects, because,
although they contain a great-number of Persian
words, the ground-work of these languages is not Persian.”
He observes that the Persian language bears a great
affinity in structure to the German. This appears in the
elements of articulation, which coincide ; in the plural
ending ah for en, as sisteran, for schwestern; in a re*
Vo» Hammer suppose» the idiom of the Pesatir, for the authenticity o f
which he contends, to he an old form of Deri, perhaps spoken at Bamian.
t Of which Shiraz is the capital.
t Professor Rask distributes these dialects somewhat differently. He thinks
that Deri was the court language of Fars, the south-western province.—Some
remarks on the Zendavesta, by Professor Rasmus Rask, Tr.j>f Roy. As. Soc. of
London, vol. 3»
semblance of nearly all the formative terminations, such as
bar, andl&eiif. The|> structure of Persian verbs is also very
similar tb'HVat" of the German and English. With respect
to "thllf agreement in words^it is observed that nearly one-
tbird?of the whMe^ock, of Persian words are replaced by
similar words in the1 Germhnife dialecfsv The whole number
of Persian words' is tn^llre thousand ; of these nearly four
thousand are common to the Persian and the German
idioms.
Paragraph 3.—Of .the Pehlvi and Zend.
The pehlvi,;ior a*,dialed^ nearly allied to it, was probably
the language of Persia duringj^tbe age of the Sassanidae.
Peidvi characters appear pn the. coins of princes of that dynasty,
and in inscriptions on monumentberneied during their
reign. The* Pehlvi appears to .have been the only written
language for many centuries previous to the Mohammedan
c%nquefcst: ’ The priests had in their hands sacred books, in
ari older idiom, now termed Zend, but thé versions and commentaries,
by the aid of which the original texts were
undefstobfd, were in the Pehlvi. When the Persian language
is mentioned by writers of the Byzantine empire, it
is probable that the Pehlvi is al ways meant.. This language
differs much from the older idiom of the Persians, which is
an Indo-Germanic dialect, whilst the Syrian or Semitic
language has contributed in, great part to the formation of
^the Pehlvi. It has the characteristics of languages intro-
Minted by foreign races. The words of which it consists are
truncated, like those of the modern dialects of southern Europe;
and are nearly destitute of grammatical terminations.*
The Pehlvi was the language of the middle ages of Persia.
How long previous to the time of the* Sassanidse it came into
use is uncertain ;'but at some remote period it seems to
have superseded the Zend. There are, likewise, proofs of
the earlier existence of another ancient language, which
has been termed the Persepolitan. It is the idiom of the
cuneiform inscriptions which have been discovered on the
Burnouf, Tfoüv. Journal Asiatique, Nutn. 3.