IRANIAN LANGUAGES AND LIT ERATURE. The dead and living languages of Iran together form, with some sporadic ver naculars existing outside its strict boundaries, the Iranian family of the Aryan or Indo Germanic speech. Among them are, however, several that have strongly deteriorated or else show considerable mingling. Thus, Afghan is greatly intermixed with Sanskritic elements; hence it is classed with the Indic by some writers. The earliest type of Iranian we know of is the Zend or Early Bactrian, and this again shows two subdivisions, a more remote and a less remote one. Both of these we only became acquainted with from the surviving fragments of the Zendavesta, as well as from the Gathas, a species of psalms, the latter being much the oldest of the two. The ancient tongue perished on the destruction of the Persian Em pire by Alexander the Great. This ancient Zend is indubitably closely related to Sanskrit and is wholly devoid of the Semitic gutturals with which modern Persian abounds; and with its wealth of vowels (notably the flat and high °a° and "o°) is both melodious and virile. Only slightly younger is Early Persian, the tongue in which cuneiform inscriptions of the Achae menids are couched. These inscriptions, found in Persepolis, Behistttn and elsewhere, which by reason of their similarity to Sanskrit and Zend, and further by reason of frequent par allel columns in Zend, are most interesting from a philological viewpoint. Early Persian and San skrit, have been wholly deciphered, reach down to the 4th century a.c. and show plain indica tions of the development of the Persian, or Iranic, idioms. Old Persian seems to have been mostly current in the west, Zend in the east of Iran. The next degree of internal change is perceived in Pehlevi, or middle Persian, for in this nearly all the former distinctive case endings and tense forms of the verb, etc., disappear. Pehlevi, nevertheless, for four cen turies became the court idiom during the whole of the Sassanide dynasty. With the Arab con quest, in the latter part of the 7th century, and the enforced introduction of Islam, Pehlevi dis appeared, together with the ancient faith. The remaining adherents of Zoroastrianism, the so called Parsis or Parsees, scattered throughout Persia or found a refuge in India. And the Parsees up to this date still utilize Zend or Pehevi for ritual purposes.
Finally, however, with Firclusi's Nameh,) the great national epic of Persia, the last stage, New Persian, is reached. And New Persian transcends the Pehlevi (or Middle Per sian) both in its purity of idiomatic diction and in its paucity of grammatical forms. New Persian, in fine, knows no grammatical gender, no case endings whatever, and expresses the various tenses of the verb by making extensive use of auxiliaries and prepositions. It is, there fore, next to English, most deficient in gram matical forms; but to compensate for this loss it possesses a great vocabulary and a rich and nicely developed syntax. However, since the days of Firdilsi (1021 A.D.) modern Persian has
again changed quite considerably, in that it has adopted innumerable words, even whole phrases, from the Arabic (losing thereby much of its one-time wealth of vowels) and in broadening its scope of word and syllable combination, such cases as a compound word made up of a noun and an adjective or of part Arabic and part Persian being by no means rare. Only the provincial dialects still spoken extensively have kept themselves freer from such whole sale borrowing, and in a sense the purest Iranic is to-day spoken in the province of Masanderan, near the Caspian. Closely related to New Persian are also the Koordish dialects, the Pashtoo (Afghan), which latter likewise pre vails in the northwestern provinces of India; the Baluchi, and the idiom of the Ossetians (who call themselves Iron, Iranians) in the Caucasus. The speech of the ancient Scythians, who dwelt on the shores of the Euxine, like wise showed Iranian type. The great hiatus between the flourishing era of Zend, during and before the Achaemenid dynasty, and the final re-establishment of a native Persian Empire under the Sassanides, was due to the rulers of foreign blood. Again, the ancient sacred liter ature was largely destroyed when Islam was introduced with fire and sword by the Arab invaders, although Zoroastrian worship sur vived to some extent in Yezd, Kerman, etc., and was also introduced in India by fugitives. The remains of the holy books extant at the time of the Arab conquest are still preserved, partly in the original language, but mostly in an ancient translation. The vehicle used in this translation was Huzvaresh, the literary, form of Pehlevi. Sir William Jones (1789) was the first to identify Pehlevi as next of kin to Sanskrit, himself following in the foot steps of his French forerunner, Anguetil Duperron (1771). However, a whole genera tion passed before thorough progress was made in the reintegration of the language. Schlegel and Bopp first put Sanskrit on a sound ,philo logical basis by their extensive labors, and simultaneously the fundamental study of the allied Iranian languages also gained ground rapidly. Burnout Olshausen, Brockhaus, Spie gel, Haug, Lagarde, Justi, Lassen and Wester gaard did much to that end. It deserves mention that our knowledge of Huzvaresh is wholly derived from the translations of the Avesta and of the Githas, as well as through a few other religious works, such as the Bun daheesh; furthermore, through inscriptions, coins and gems. It was not always of the same type; rather it differed considerably at different times and places, according to the larger or smaller infusion of Semitic words.
Bibliography.— Geiger, Lazarus, ranische Kuhurl (Erlangen 1882) ; Gray, L. H., Phonology' (New York 1902) ; Gutschmid, H. von, 'Geschichte bans' (Tubin gen 1888) ; Rairlinson, Sir Henry C., Great Monarchies of the Eastern World' (3d and 4th vols., London 1865) ; Spiegel, F., Altertumskunde' (3 vols., Leipzig 1871-78).