Avestan alphabet
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Yasna 28.1 (Bodleian MS J2) |
Din dabireh is the name of the system used to render
Avestan language words in written form. The Avestan language, which is probably as old as Vedic Sanskrit, is believed to have remained a spoken language until the 3rd or 4th century when the
Din dabireh alphabet was designed to represent it. Because Avestan is the only language written with
Din dabireh, the writing system is generally termed the
Avestan alphabet.
By the early period of
Sassanid Persia, Avestan had almost ceased to be a understood by the general public, and had been supplanted by
middle Persian as the language of the laity. However, the sacred texts of the
Avesta, which had probably been transmitted orally for centuries before then, continued to be recited by all in the
Avestan language (and continue to be so to this day).
It is not known what precisely prompted the development of an alphabet for spoken Avestan. It may have been to facilitate the compilation of the
Zend commentaries and translations of the Avesta. Alternatively, the need for such an alphabet may have become apparent during the reconstruction of the royal library by
Ardashir I (
226-
241) and
Shapur II (
309-
379), that was said to have been destroyed by the
Alexander's troops in
330 BCE (see below).
Din dabireh may not have been the first script used for rendering spoken Avestan. The
Arda-Viraf Nameh, a 2nd century semi-religious work, suggests that Avesta texts existed in written form at the time of
Alexander's invasion of Persia in
330 BCE. However, those texts have not survived and it is not known what script those texts might have been in.
The Pahlavi script, upon which
Din dabireh is based, was in common use for representing
middle Persian, but was not adequate for representing Avestan since Pahlavi was an
abjad syllabry which only contained a handful of consonant characters (most with multiple pronunciations), and left most vowels unexpressed. Pahlavi script had at most 22 characters - the number varied by region and epoch, and as "Book Pahlavi", the most common form of the script, had only 12 characters representing 24 sounds.
In contrast,
Din dabireh was a full alphabet, with explicit characters for vowels, and allowed for phonetic disambiguation of
allophones. The alphabet included many of the Pahlavi script consonantal characters, to which it assigned inherent vowel sounds (for example, k'â†'ka), and also added some several more. Its development has been attributed to a Zoroastrian priest named Abarbad Maraspand.
Both Pahlavi script and
Din dabireh are written right-to-left.
In total,
Din dabireh has 37 consonants and 16 vowels.The grapheme inventory of Din dabireh is usually transliterated as follows:
Vowels: :Consonants::
ii and
uu represent semi-vocalic glides, sometimes transliterated as
y and
w.
Din dabireh is sometimes confused with the
Pazend language, a reduced form of
middle Persian that excluded vocabulary of non-Persian origin. This error is due to a 19th century confusion of the Zend (the commentaries on the Avesta) with the Avesta proper, which resulted in Pazend (literally: language of the Zend) being mistaken for the "language" (
Din dabireh script) of the Avesta texts.
*
Avestan language*
Avesta*
Pazend language*
Pahlavi script*
Avestan alphabet*
Pahlavi alphabet
