The Parthian language, also known as Arsacid Pahlavi and Pahlawānīg, is an extinct ancient Northwestern Iranian language once spoken in Parthia, a region situated in present-day northeastern Iran and Turkmenistan. Parthian was the language of state of the Arsacid Parthian Empire (248 BC – 224 AD), as well as of its eponymous branches of the Arsacid dynasty of Armenia, Arsacid dynasty of Iberia, and the Arsacid dynasty of Caucasian Albania. Parthian had a significant impact on Armenian, a large part of whose vocabulary was formed primarily from borrowings from Parthian, and had a derivational morphology and syntax that was also affected by language contact but to a lesser extent. Many ancient Parthian words were preserved and now survive only in Armenian. The Semnani or Komisenian languages may descend from Parthian directly or be a Caspian language with Parthian influences, but the topic lacks sufficient research.

Classification

Parthian was a Western Middle Iranian language. Language contact made it share some features of Eastern Iranian languages, the influence of which is attested primarily in loanwords. Some traces of Eastern influence survive in Parthian loanwords in Armenian. Parthian loanwords appear in everyday Armenian vocabulary; nouns, adjectives, adverbs, denominative verbs, and administrative and religious lexicons. Taxonomically, Parthian, an Indo-European language, belongs to the Northwestern Iranian language group while Middle Persian belongs to the Southwestern Iranian language group.

Orthography

The Parthian language was rendered using the Pahlavi writing system, which had two essential characteristics. Firstly, its script derived from Aramaic, the script (and language) of the Achaemenid chancellery (Imperial Aramaic). Secondly, it had a high incidence of Aramaic words, which are rendered as ideograms or logograms; they were written as Aramaic words but pronounced as Parthian ones (See Arsacid Pahlavi for details). The Parthian language was the language of the old Satrapy of Parthia and was used in the Arsacids courts. The main sources for Parthian are the few remaining inscriptions from Nisa and Hecatompylos, Manichaean texts, Sasanian multilingual inscriptions and remains of Parthian literature in the succeeding Middle Persian. The later Manichaean texts, composed shortly after the demise of the Parthian power, play an important role for reconstructing the Parthian language. Those Manichaean manuscripts contain no ideograms.

Attestations

Attestations of the Parthian language include:

Samples

This sample of Parthian literature is taken from a Manichaean text fragment:

Differences from Middle Persian

Although Parthian was quite similar to Middle Persian in many aspects, clear differences in lexical, morphological and phonological forms can still be observed. In the text above, the following forms can be noticed: Other prominent differences, not found in the text above, include the personal pronoun ⟨az⟩, I, instead of ⟨an⟩ and the present tense root of the verb ⟨kardan⟩, to do, ⟨kar-⟩ instead of Middle Persian ⟨kun-⟩. Also, the Middle Persian linking particle and relative pronoun ⟨ī(g)⟩ was not present in Parthian, but the relative pronoun ⟨čē⟩, what, was used in a similar manner.

Sources