Re: VMs: RE: flowers & stars: Zoroastrian stuff, Pahlavi

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

23/02/2005 6:45:09 PM, "Joseph H Peterson" <joe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


>· Pahlavi freely mixes MP graphemes with ideographs, which derive from
>Aramaic

That is news to me. Phalavi is apparently derived from Aramaic, but Aramaic
is purely alphabetical. No ideographs in it all. Unlike, say, their neighbours
the Ancient Egyptians.

>· The Pahlavi script was so difficult towards the end of its official use,

It became more and more difficult because it became more and more
cursive. It is far more difficult to read Egyptian Demotic, the cursive
script, than the hieroglyphs you see on monuments. Likewise,
reading Chinese or Japanese cursive (called caoshu in Chinese, soosho
in Japanese) requires an excellent knowledge of the literary languages.
It's like reading a medical doctor's scribbles: you need to know not only
English, but the medical jargon and how they use it. The Chinese and 
he Japanese, however, cultivated their "scribbles" for aesthetic purposes.

>There is a sample of the script at http://www.avesta.org/denkard/denkard.htm

It looks strikingly like Mongolian, rotated 90 degrees (the Mongolian script has
the same origin, so no surprise there)

>It is not trivial to transcribe Pahlavi because of its use of ideographs,

The image on the link above shows no ideographs.

If you know of an image of Pahlavi texts with ideographs, 
post the links here.




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