Talk:Frahang-i Pahlavig

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In the revision of 8 October 2005 it said: The glossary was composed to give Sassanid court officials a training in huzvarishn.
Where does that come from? (I've kept it in principle, but flagged it with a citation needed)
Please cc: any info to my talk page. Thanks. -- Fullstop 16:26, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for the work you have done improving this article. I do not know much on this subject — I'm an Aramaic specialist — but I've tried to add what I can. I felt that the example of the KLB'/sag huzvarishn was a useful explanation of how they worked. Is the reason for its removal that it is not technically correct? I cannot remember much about my previous edit to this article, and I cannot find it my notes. However, the place of the Frahang in th Sassanid administration seems to make sense. Perhaps it is providing a more definite raison d'être than can be fully suported. — Gareth Hughes 21:12, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

1. With respect to the Frahang in the Sassanid period: Yes, I can imagine that the Frahang might indeed have been useful to court officials. However, I'm uneasy with it because:

• It reinforces the idea that the Avesta (or at least Yazatan names) had, at some previous time, been commonly written in Aramaic. This would support Zoroastrian legend, but contradict the scholarly belief that the Avesta had only been written down during the Sassanid era and had only be transmitted orally before then. (See also my articles on Din Dabireh and Avesta).
• Considering that both Achaemenid and Sassanid courts were Zoroastrian (notwithstanding the fact that the Achaeminids wrote religious texts in Younger Avestan, while the Sassanids used middle Persian) would a whole chapter (the first one) on Zoroastrian terms have been necessary? If so, why would this have been relevant to court officials? However, if the Frahang were a later work as the date of the extant manuscripts suggests, by which time Islam had almost completely supplanted Zoroastrianism, those terms would have indeed been necessary.

Those implications aside, what interests me personally is how this is known to have occurred. Or to put it another way, are there document(s) which record the day-to-day working of the Sassanid administration?

2. With respect to the KLB'/sag thing:

>>Aramaic huzvarishn was meant to be read as a Persian word. For example, the Frahang gives the huzvarishn KLB', the Aramaic consonantal text for 'dog', to be read as the Persian word for 'dog', sag.

I'm probably missing something. I can imagine that it may have been useful to a speaker of Persian to recognize what the Aramaic word for 'dog' was, but what purpose would it serve to pronounce that Aramaic ideogram as 'sag'? Wouldn't that be like a speaker of English who reads Agricola to pronounce the name of the author as "Farmer" (and a German would pronounce it "Bauer")?

-- Fullstop 13:03, 9 May 2006 (UTC) ps: how is the Aramaic word for dog pronounced by speakers of Aramaic?

"Kalbah" is "dog" is Aramaic. Although the pronunciation would depend on the speakers dialect (there are several.) Hope this helps.Guedalia D'Montenegro 00:54, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

What was the point of the thing`?

The article doesn't really explain what was the point of having such a thing in the first place. Why not write in Iranian? -- 92.229.87.58 (talk) 22:47, 31 March 2010 (UTC)