PAHLAVI 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, which means Parthian, can be traced back for many centuries ; the poet Firdausi (loth century) repeatedly speaks of Pahlavi books as the sources of his narratives and tells us that in the time of the first Khos rau (Chosroes I., A.D. the Pahlavi character alone was used in Persia. The learned Ibn Mokaffat (8th century) calls Pahlavi one of the languages of Persia, and seems to imply that it was an official language. The passage, in which useful facts are mixed up with strange notions, is given abridged in Fihrist, p. 14, more fully by Yakut, iii. 925, but most fully and accurately in the al-tolitm (ed. Vloten, ii6). The term is now applied to Middle Persian (from the 3rd to the 7th century A.D.), whether written in the older characters of the inscriptions, which begin with the Arsacid (Parthian) kings, or the cursive writine of the Sassanian period.
The great peculiarity of the language is that though it is Iranian, it is full of Semitic (Aramaic) words. Not only Aramaic nouns and verbs, but numerals, particles and pronouns are used side by side with Persian words. It was once thought to be a mixed language, which like English had largely adopted a foreign vocabulary, but it is now recognized that the Aramaic words are ideograms, and that the corresponding Persian word was always used in reading. Owing to the defective alphabet the words are often ambiguous, and some of them cannot be recognized as Semitic, but we can always tell the Persian word intended. This view, the development of which began with Westergaard (Zend avesta, p. 20, note), is in full accordance with the true and ancient tradition. Thus Ibn Mokaffe, who translated many Pahlavi books into Arabic, tells us that the Persians had about 1,000 words which they wrote otherwise than they were pronounced in Persian. For bread he says they wrote LHMA, i.e., the Aramaic lalpnd, but they pronounced nan, which is the common Persian word for bread. Similarly BSRA, the Aramaic besrd, flesh, was pro nounced as the Persian gosht.
We still possess a glossary which actually gives the Pahlavi writing with its Persian pronunciation. This glossary, which be
sides 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 Mokaffat had in view. Thus the Persians did the same thing, as when in English we write £ (libra) and pronounce "pound" or write & or & (et) and pronounce "and." No sytem was followed in the choice of Semitic forms. Sometimes a noun was written in its status absolutes, sometimes the emphatic a was added, and this was sometimes written as w, sometimes as n. 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 khwesh and khwat both mean "self"; the former is written NFshii (naf or nafsheh), the latter BNFShH with the preposition be prefixed. Personal pronouns are expressed in the dative (i.e., with prepositional 1 prefixed), thus LK (lakh) for tic, "thou," LNH (land) for aind, "we." Great difficulties arise from the ambiguous nature of the cursive characters. Modern mss., following Arabic models, intro duce diacritical points from time to time, and often incorrectly.
But a much more important help is found in the so-called Pazand or transcription of Pahlavi texts, in which the Semitic words are replaced by Persian as they are to be read, and which are written in the quite clear Avesta character. Pazand mss. present dialectical variations according to the taste or intelligence of authors and copyists, and all have many false readings. For us, however, they are of the greatest use. To get a conception of Pahlavi one cannot do better than read the Mindi-Khiradh in the Pahlavi with constant reference to the Pazand. The Book of the Mainyo-i Khard in the Original Pahlavi, ed. by Fr. Ch. Andreas (Kiel, 1882) idem, The Pazand and Sanskrit Texts, by E. W. West (Stuttgart and London, 1871). Critical labour is still required to give an approximate reproduction of the author's own pronunci ation of what he wrote.