Parthian language
| Parthian | |
|---|---|
| Arsacid Pahlavi | |
| Pahlawānīg | |
| Native to | Parthian Empire (incl. Arsacid dynasty of Armenia, Arsacid dynasty of Iberia and Arsacid Dynasty of Caucasian Albania) |
| Region | Parthia, ancient Iran |
| Era | State language 248 BC – 224 AD. Marginalized by Middle Persian from the 3rd century, though longer existent in the Caucasus due to several eponymous branches |
| Inscriptional Parthian, Manichaean alphabet | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
|
Linguist list
|
xpr |
| Glottolog | part1239 |
The Parthian language, also known as Arsacid Pahlavi and Pahlawānīg, is a now-extinct ancient Northwestern Iranian language spoken in Parthia, a region of northeastern ancient Iran. 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.
This language had a huge impact on Armenian, a large part of whose vocabulary was formed primarily from borrowings from Parthian.
Parthian was a Western Middle Iranian language. Language contact made it share some features of the Eastern Iranian language group, the influence of which is attested primarily in loanwords. Some traces of Eastern influence survive in Parthian loanwords in Armenian.
Taxonomically, Parthian belongs to the Northwestern Iranian language group while Middle Persian belongs to the Southwestern Iranian language group.
The Parthian language was rendered using the Pahlavi writing system, which had two essential characteristics: First, its script derived from Aramaic, the script (and language) of the Achaemenid chancellery (i.e. Imperial Aramaic). Second, it had a high incidence of Aramaic words, rendered as ideograms or logograms, that is, they were written Aramaic words but understood as Parthian ones (See Arsacid Pahlavi for details).
...
Wikipedia