Middle Persian

Middle Persian, also known by its endonym Pārsīk or Pārsīg in its later form, is a Western Middle Iranian language which became the literary language of the Sasanian Empire. For some time after the Sasanian collapse, Middle Persian continued to function as a prestige language. It descended from Old Persian, the language of the Achaemenid Empire and is the linguistic ancestor of Modern Persian, the official language of Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

Name

Ērānīg is a term used to describe Middle Persian during the Sassanid period. The word, derived from the root Ērān, means "belonging to Iran, the Iranian language". This expression, particularly in official inscriptions, indicates that the Sassanids defined themselves as ethnically and culturally "Iranian".
The term appears most clearly in the Ka'ba-i Zoroaster inscription of the high priest Kartir. Here, Kartir uses the phrase "ērānīg ud anērānīg". Furthermore, the multilingual inscription of Shapur I reveals that Middle Persian was the primary state language of the empire and, together with the concept of Ērānšahr, formed a political identity.
The term Ērānīg: It is one of the most important epigraphic evidences showing the conscious redefinition of Iranian identity during the Sassanid period, reflecting the connection between language, identity and state ideology.
"Middle Iranian" is the name given to the middle stage of development of the numerous Iranian languages and dialects. The middle stage of the Iranian languages begins around 450 BCE and ends around 650 CE. One of those Middle Iranian languages is Middle Persian, i.e. the middle stage of the language of the Persians, an Iranian people of Persia proper, which lies in the south-western Iran highlands on the border with Babylonia. The Persians called their language Parsig, meaning "Persian".
Another Middle Iranian language was Parthian, i.e. the language of the northwestern Iranian peoples of Parthia proper, which lies along the southern/south-eastern edge of the Caspian sea and is adjacent to the boundary between western and eastern Iranian languages. The Parthians called their language Parthawig, meaning "Parthian". Via regular sound changes Parthawig became Pahlawig, from which the word 'Pahlavi' eventually evolved. The -ig in parsig and parthawig was a regular Middle Iranian appurtenant suffix for "pertaining to". The New Persian equivalent of -ig is -i.
When the Arsacids came to power in the 3rd-century BCE, they inherited the use of written Greek as the language of government. Under the cultural influence of the Greeks, some Middle Iranian languages, such as Bactrian, also had begun to be written in Greek script. But yet other Middle Iranian languages began to be written in a script derived from Aramaic. This occurred primarily because written Aramaic had previously been the written language of government of the former Achaemenids, and the government scribes had carried that practice all over the empire. This practice had led to others adopting Imperial Aramaic as the language of communications, both between Iranians and non-Iranians. The transition from Imperial Aramaic to Middle Iranian took place very slowly, with a slow increase of more and more Iranian words so that Aramaic with Iranian elements gradually changed into Iranian with Aramaic elements. Under Arsacid hegemony, this Aramaic-derived writing system for Iranian languages came to be associated with the Parthians in particular, and thus the writing system came to be called pahlavi "Parthian" too.
Aside from Parthian, Aramaic-derived writing was adopted for at least four other Middle Iranian languages, one of which was Middle Persian. In the 3rd-century CE, the Parthian Arsacids were overthrown by the Sassanids, who were natives of the south-west and thus spoke Middle Persian as their native language. Under Sassanid hegemony, the Middle Persian language became a prestige dialect and thus also came to be used by non-Persian Iranians. In the 7th-century, the Sassanids were overthrown by the Arabs. Under Arab influence, Iranian languages began to be written in Arabic script, while Middle Persian began to rapidly evolve into New Persian and the name parsik became Arabicized farsi. Not all Iranians were comfortable with these Arabic-influenced developments, in particular, members of the literate elite, which in Sassanid times consisted primarily of Zoroastrian priests. Those former elites vigorously rejected what they perceived as 'Un-Iranian', and continued to use the "old" language and Aramaic-derived writing system. Numerous examples can be identified through the myriad of Middle Persian Zoroastrian scriptures, such as the Denkard, Shkand-gumãnig Vizār, and many more. In time, the name of the writing system, pahlavi "Parthian", began to be applied to the "old" Middle Persian language as well, thus distinguishing it from the "new" language, farsi. Consequently, 'pahlavi' came to denote the particularly Zoroastrian, exclusively written, late form of Middle Persian. Since almost all surviving Middle Persian literature is in this particular late form of exclusively written Zoroastrian Middle Persian, the term 'Pahlavi' became synonymous with Middle Persian itself.
The ISO 639 language code for Middle Persian is pal, which reflects the post-Sasanian era use of the term Pahlavi to refer to the language and not only the script.

History

Transition from Old Persian

In the classification of the Iranian languages, the Middle Period includes those languages which were common in Iran from the fall of the Achaemenid Empire in the fourth century BCE up to the fall of the Sasanian Empire in the seventh century CE.
The most important and distinct development in the structure of Iranian languages of this period is the transformation from the synthetic form of the Old Period to an analytic form:

nouns, pronouns, and adjectives lost almost all of their case inflections
prepositions were used to indicate the different roles of words.
many tenses began to be formed from a composite form
the language developed a split ergative morphosyntactic alignment

There were also a number of phonological developments during this period, including:

Contraction of vowels across semivowels; iya → ī, uwa → ū
Lenition of voiced stops following vowels and resonants; b, d, j, g → β, ð, ʒ, ɣ
Creation of new /l/ from previous clusters of /r/ and a fricative; i.e. /rð, rz/ → /l/ and /rθ, rs/ → /hl/
Metathesis -ry- to -yr-, with the /j/ subsequently combining with preceding vowels through processes of monophthongisation
Monophthongisation of ay, aw → ē, ō
Loss of /θ/ : becoming /s/ word initially and /h/ elsewhere
Loss of word-final vowels
Lenition of voiceless stops p, t, č, k to voiced b, d, j, g
Transition to New Persian

The modern-day descendants of Middle Persian are New Persian and Luri. The changes between late Middle and Early New Persian were very gradual, and in the 10th–11th centuries, Middle Persian texts were still intelligible to speakers of Early New Persian. However, there are definite differences that had taken place already by the 10th century:

sound changes, such as
*the dropping of unstressed initial vowels
*the epenthesis of vowels in initial consonant clusters
*the loss of -g when word final
*change of initial w- to either b- or gw- → g-
changes in the verbal system, notably the loss of distinctive subjunctive and optative forms, and the increasing use of verbal prefixes to express verbal moods
a transition from split ergative back to consistent nominative-accusative morphosyntactic alignment
changes in the vocabulary, particularly the establishment of a superstratum or adstratum of Arabic loanwords replacing many Aramaic loans and native terms.
the substitution of the Pahlavi script for the Arabic script
Surviving literature

Texts in Middle Persian are found in remnants of Sasanian inscriptions and Egyptian papyri, coins and seals, fragments of Manichaean writings, and Zoroastrian literature, most of which was written down after the Sasanian era. The language of Zoroastrian literature is sometimes referred to as Pahlavi – a name that originally referred to the Pahlavi scripts, which were also the preferred writing system for several other Middle Iranian languages. Pahlavi Middle Persian is the language of quite a large body of literature which details the traditions and prescriptions of Zoroastrianism, which was the state religion of Sasanian Iran before the Muslim conquest of Persia. The earliest texts in Zoroastrian Middle Persian were probably written down in late Sasanian times, although they represent the codification of earlier oral tradition. However, most texts date from the ninth to the 11th century, when Middle Persian had long ceased to be a spoken language, so they reflect the state of affairs in living Middle Persian only indirectly. The surviving manuscripts are usually 14th-century copies. Other, less abundantly attested varieties are Manichaean Middle Persian, used for a sizable amount of Manichaean religious writings, including many theological texts, homilies and hymns, and the Middle Persian of the Church of the East, evidenced in the Pahlavi Psalter ; these were used until the beginning of the second millennium in many places in Central Asia, including Turpan and even localities in South India. All three differ minimally from one another and indeed the less ambiguous and archaizing scripts of the latter two have helped to elucidate some aspects of the Sasanian-era pronunciation of the former.

Phonology

Vowels

The vowels of Middle Persian were the following:

	Front	Central	Back
Close	,		,
Mid	,		,
Open		,

It has been doubted whether the Middle Persian short mid vowels and were phonemic, since they do not appear to have a unique continuation in later forms of Persian and no minimal pairs have been found. The evidence for them is variation between spelling with and without the matres lectionis y and w, as well as etymological considerations. They are thought to have arisen from earlier in certain conditions, including, for, the presence of a following, sibilant or front vowel in the next syllable, and for, the presence of a following labial consonant or the vowel in the next syllable. Long and had appeared first in Middle Persian, since they had developed from the Old Persian diphthongs and.