خلاصة:
The main West Iranian languages, i.e. Old Persian, Parthian, Middle Persian, New Persian and – in some respects – Avestan, may be studied in a uniquely continuous development stretching over close to 3 000 years. These languages are not only the result of their genetic inter-relations but also of their cultural, religious and political history. They may be labelled ‘high languages’ (‘Hochsprachen’), in the sense that they are cultured and standardized and used for a great number of purposes by people of various linguistic backgrounds. This article presents an over-view of their development seen from a specific perspective. The traditional Iranian walled-in garden, the pairi-daēza- of the Avesta, is used as a metaphor for a high language in contrast to the free vegetation of spontaneous human speech in social interaction. The latter is here called ‘dialect’, a concept that includes both ‘geolect’ and ‘sociolect’. These high language ‘gardens’ are thus viewed as a kind of cultural artefacts. Among other things, this has implications for views on the dichotomy literacy/orality, showing that writing is not language and that ‘orality’ belongs both to ‘high language’ and ‘dialect’. It is furthermore argued that literacy and orality were present in complementary distribution throughout the whole known history of the Iranian cultural sphere.
ملخص الجهاز:
"As already mentioned, the new high language, Old Persian, was written with a newly created script, a syllabic writing consisting of simple cuneiform symbols (36 signs), surely invented under the influence of the Aramaic alphabet, which at that time spread victoriously over all the Near East.
There were around 550 years of unknown development in between, and by the time of Ardashir there was probably no living knowledge of the Old Persian writing system and the language that was recorded in the inscriptions that still could be seen on the walls of rocks and other remaining monuments from Achaemenid times.
Was the Middle Persian that became the state language of the Sasanian Empire mainly a standardization of a local spoken dialect in the Province of Pars or was it rather an inherited linguistic-cultural-political system that had developed continually through these 500 years – in spite of all political reversals and national disasters?
The process that led to the emergence of a new Persian high language, which also became a written language, has been much discussed, not least in a series of important articles by Gilbert Lazard, collected in a volume entitled La formation de la langue Persane (1995), and Iranian scholars like ‘Alī Ashraf Ṣādiqī (1359?), but this process is still far from clear.
One of them was a natural continuation of the old dialect of Fars (Pars) that in the beginning of the Muslim period was known as Pārsī and was used in the central and southern parts of Iran, and the other was a heavily parthianized variety that was used in and around the Sasanian court and thus called Darī, the court language."