Aramaic in a Persian Alphabet.

Language Log reports on a striking discovery, quoting Ariel David in Haaretz:

Around 1,400 years ago, or even earlier, somebody scribbled on the wall of a Jewish cemetery in Beit She’arim, in today’s northern Israel. The graffito was first spotted during excavations at this sprawling ancient necropolis in the 1950s, but experts could not make head or tail of it. Now for the first time, the key to unraveling the mystery has been found after two experts in Iranian history saw the text.

They were the first to realize it was written using Pahlavi script, an ancient alphabet developed for the administration, coinage and royal inscriptions of the once mighty Sassanid Persian Empire. Plus some isolated Hebrew or Aramaic letters. But there was more to the mystery.

“When I saw it I immediately thought it was Pahlavi, but then as I kept reading I realized that while the alphabet was Middle Persian, the language was not,” says Domenico Agostini, a professor of ancient history at Tel Aviv University. “I was stunned.”

He also wondered what a Middle Persian graffito was doing at Beit She’arim in the first place. So, it turns out that the seven lines of text were written in Aramaic transliterated into the alphabet that was normally used to write Middle Persian, the form of Persian common at the time of the Sassanid dynasty (3rd-7th century C.E.).

More at the link; it actually surprises me that there aren’t other examples, since Aramaic was the lingua franca of the day.

Comments

  1. David Eddyshaw says

    Given that the Pahlavi script is derived from an Aramaic script, and that Pahlavi is written with a great many Persian words consistently written as Aramaic (e.g. sag “dog” was written klb’ ), it is not astonishing that there should be examples of actual Aramaic in Pahlavi script.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pahlavi_scripts

    Pahlavi script probably comfortably wins the prize for worst ever writing system actually based on an alphabet. It’s about as unsuitable for writing Persian as human ingenuity can devise.

  2. Stu Clayton says

    Pahlavi script probably comfortably wins the prize for worst ever writing system actually based on an alphabet. It’s about as unsuitable for writing Persian as human ingenuity can devise.

    There is stiff competition by French and English, though not by German and Spanish – for the same kind of reasons adduced at your link:

    # … during much of its later history, Pahlavi orthography was characterized by historical or archaizing spellings. Most notably, it continued to reflect the pronunciation that preceded the widespread Iranian lenition processes, whereby postvocalic voiceless stops and affricates had become voiced, and voiced stops had become semivowels. Similarly, certain words continued to be spelt with postvocalic ⟨s⟩ and ⟨t⟩ even after the consonants had been debuccalized to ⟨h⟩ in the living language. #

    I see this “worst of” game in the same ballpark as “greatest novelist of the 20th century”.

  3. @Stu: well, English could compete with Pahlavi if it left out all vowels and then frequently would use French words to render English ones:
    th grnd wht chn chsd th ptt nr rbbt

  4. David Eddyshaw says

    Ah, but for French or English spelling to rival Pahlavi, all the common words would have to be written in Turkish. (And all short vowels would have to be omitted, of course; and d z and r would always be written identically.) “Candle” would accordingly be written mm.

    Those Persian scribes knew a nice jobs-for-life racket when they saw one.

    [ninja’d by Hans]

  5. Stu Clayton says

    th grnd wht chn chsd th ptt nr rbbt

    Perfectly transparent. After all, you did explain the rules. Is that the best you can do ?

    The dog Sparky verified my understanding of the sentence. He added that it is a daylight sentence.

    When you are fluent in a language, it’s easier to handle apparent discrepancies between speech and text. I instance the Spanish of southern Spain, as spoken at breakneck speed by astrophysicists. Now that my vocabulary has grown, after several years of listening to this on radio (señalyruido punto com), I need hear only about half of the sounds in a word to recognize it. That’s all those guys give you anyway. Oh, and all consonants become a slight flap of the tip of the tongue.

  6. Stu Clayton says

    That impudent puppy Akismet has put my thoughtful reply into moderation.

  7. David Marjanović says

    There is stiff competition by French and English, though not by German and Spanish – for the same kind of reasons adduced at your link:

    Don’t stop there. Read the three sections about Book Pahlavi.

  8. Stu Clayton says

    I read enough to make a joke. About stiff competition, not identity of indiscernibles.

  9. Perfectly transparent. After all, you did explain the rules. Is that the best you can do ?
    The point was not whether an intelligent person who knows the rules can decipher it (this is also true for Pahlavi), it was that such a system is harder to decipher than English in Standard orthography.

  10. David Eddyshaw says

    Oh, and all consonants become a slight flap of the tip of the tongue

    My Hispanic son has always said that the secret of speaking Andalusian Spanish is not to pronounce any of the consonants. (Traditional Cockney is very similar; but I am sorry to say that the Young People of Today can’t be bothered to not pronounce their consonants properly.)

  11. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

    I don’t think one can talk about Andalusian Spanish as a monolithic whole. It was quite a while ago that I was in Granada, but the main thing that struck me was that it didn’t sound as different from Madrid as i expected. I was at a meeting in Málaga a couple of months ago but didn’t speak much with locals apart from taxi drivers. Córdoba and Seville I know much better. I didn’t find Córdoba all that easy to understand, but Seville is so much like South American Spanish that I found it very easy. The main point, though, is that although Córdoba and Sevilla are not all that far apart (140 km, according to Google Maps — I would have guessed about half that) their accents are far from being the same.

  12. David Marjanović says
  13. I propose using the same English logogram for latinate words and synonymos English phrasal verbs, with two readings.

  14. David Eddyshaw says

    Can we express the flexions using a syllabary? (Two different syllabaries would be even cooler …)

  15. January First-of-May says

    Oh, and all consonants become a slight flap of the tip of the tongue.

    I thought that was a Danish thing.

  16. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

    I thought that was a Danish thing.

    Me too. I sometimes wonder how Danes manage in Portugal, or Portuguese in Denmark: a languages without consonants meets a language without vowels.

  17. > Two different syllabaries would be even cooler …

    They should use the same symbols to represent different phonemes.

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