II. LANGUAGES OF THE PARSI SCRIPTURES. THE languages of Persia, commonly called Iranian, form a separate family of the great Aryan stock of languages which comprises, besides the Iranian idioms, Sanskrit (with its daughters), Greek, Latin, Teutonic (with English), Slavonian, Letto-Lithuanian, Celtic, and all allied dialects. The Iranian idioms arrange themselves under two heads: 1. Iranian languages properly so called. 2. Affiliated tongues. The first division comprises the ancient, mediæval, and modern languages of Iran, which includes Persia, Media, and Bactria, those lands which are styled in the ZendAvesta airydo danhâvó, “Aryan countries." We may class them as follows: (a.) The East Iranian or Bactrian branch, extant only in the two dialects. in which the scanty fragments of the Parsi scriptures are written. The more ancient of them may be called the "Gâtha dialect," because the most extensive and important writings preserved in this peculiar idiom are the so-called Gâthas or hymns; the later idiom, in which most of the books of the Zend-Avesta are written, may be called "ancient Bactrian," or "the classical Avesta language," which was for many centuries the spoken and written language of Bactria. The Bactrian languages seem to have been dying out in the third century B.C., and they have left no daughters. (b.) The West Iranian languages, or those of Media and E Kucanian Persia. These are known to us during the three periods of antiquity, middle ages, and modern times, but only in the one dialect, which has, at every period, served as the written language throughout the Iranian provinces of the Persian empire. Several dialects are mentioned by lexicographers, but we know very little about them.1 Of the ancient Persian a few documents are still extant in the cuneiform inscriptions of the kings of the Achæmenian dynasty, found in the ruins of Persepolis, on the rock of Behistun, near Hamadan, and some other places in Persia. This language stands nearest to the two Bactrian dialects of the Zend-Avesta, but exhibits some peculiarities; for instance, we find d used instead of z, as adam, "I," in the Avesta azem; dasta, "hand," in the Avesta zasta. It is undoubtedly the mother of modern Persian, but the differences between them are nevertheless great, and in reading and interpreting the ancient Persian cuneiform inscriptions, Sanskrit and the Avesta, although they be only sister languages, have proved more useful than its daughter, the modern Persian. The chief cause of this difference between ancient and modern Persian is the loss of nearly all the grammatical inflexions of nouns and verbs, and the total disregard of gender, in modern Persian; while in the ancient Persian, as written and spoken at the time of the 1 In Sayyid Husain Shah Hakikat's Persian grammar, entitled Tuhfatu1-'Ajam, there are seven Iranian languages enumerated, which are classed under two heads, viz. (a) the obsolete or dead, and (b) such dialects as are still used. Of the obsolete he knows four: Sughdi, the language of ancient Sogdiana (Sughdha in the Zend-Avesta); Zâuli (for Zabult), the dialect of Zabulistân; Sakzi, spoken in Sajastân (called Sakastene by the Greeks); and Hiriwt, spoken in Herat (Harbyu in the ZendAvesta). As languages in use he mentions Pârst, which, he says, was spoken in Istakhar (Persepolis), the ancient capital of Persia; then Darî, or language of the court, according to this writer, spoken at Balkh, Bokhara, Marv, and in Badakhshân; and Pahlart, or Pahlavânt, the language of the so-called Pahlav, comprising the districts of Rai (Ragha in the Zend-Avesta), Ispahan, and Dînûr. Dart he calls the language of Firdausi, but the trifling deviations he mentions to prove the difference between Darî and Pûrsî (for instance, ashkam, "belly," used in Dart for shikam, and abd, "with," for ba), refer only to slight changes in spelling, and are utterly insufficient to induce a philologist to consider Dari an idiom different from Pârsî. Achæmenians (B.C. 500-300), we still find a great many inflexions agreeing with those of the Sanskrit, Avesta, and other ancient Aryan tongues. At what time the Persian language, like the English, became simplified, and adapted for amalgamating with foreign words, by the loss of its terminations, we cannot ascertain. But there is every reason to suppose that this dissolution and absorption of terminations, on account of their having become more or less unintelligible, began before the Christian era, because in the later inscriptions of the Achæmenians (B.C. 400), we find already some of the grammatical forms confounded, which confusion we discover also in many parts of the Zend-Avesta. No inscription in the vernacular Persian of the Arsacidans, the successors of the Achæmenians, being extant, we cannot trace the gradual dissolution of the terminations; and when we next meet with the vernacular, in the inscriptions of the first two Sasanian monarchs, it appears in the curiously mixed form of Pahlavi, which gradually changes till about A.D. 300, when it differs but little from the Pahlavi of the Parsi books, as we shall shortly see. The second chief division of the Iranian tongues comprises the affiliated languages, that is to say, such as share in the chief peculiarities of this family, but differ from it in many essential particulars. To this division we must refer Ossetic, spoken by some small tribes in the Caucasus, but differing completely from the other Caucasian languages; also Armenian and Afghanic (Pashtû). After this brief notice of the Iranian languages in general, we shall proceed to the more particular consideration of the languages of the Zend-Avesta and other religious literature of the Parsis. 1. THE LANGUAGE OF THE AVESTA ERRONEOUSLY CALLED ZEND. The original language of the Parsi scriptures has usually been called Zend by European scholars, but this name has |