Writing Pahlavi in the Latin Script

The terms transliteration and transcription are used with reference to the Pahlavi script to mean two distinct things. Pahlavi writing left a lot of room for ambiguity because vowels were not written, many symbols represented multiple sounds and some words were written in Aramaic but read in Iranian. As a result, both the transcription and the transliteration of Pahlavi texts involve some degree of interpretation, rather than simply remapping the graphic sequence.

In a transliteration, the number of symbols in the transliterated string is the same as the number in the Pahlavi string, the scholar responsible for the transliteration having made a decision about which phonetic interpretation of any given Pahlavi symbol was intended by the original author. So any word written in Pahlavi could have multiple possible transliterations. In order to interpret or translate a passage of text, a knowledge of Middle Iranian phonology is required in order to decide what combinations of sounds a particular string of letters could possibly represent and to insert the appropriate vowels, and an understanding of the surrounding text is required in order to whittle these possibilities down to the one which is most appropriate in the context.

In a transcription, the word is interpreted phonemically, so every sound is written. The rules of phonology will have been applied to the transcribed string so that it more closely reflects the pronunciation rather than the original spelling of the word. The transcribed string may likely contain more symbols that the Pahlavi string, if only because the vowels have been written.

By way of example, a Pahlavi word written with the 3rd, 5th and 14th letters of the Pahlavi consonantary (in that order) could be transliterated as ‘dwc’, ‘gnc’, ‘gwc’ or ‘ywc’ - these are the combinations of sounds which could be produced by sounding out these combinations of letters. But there are no such Middle Iranian words. So the word would be transcribed as ‘duz’ (thief), ‘gani’ (treasure), ‘gòz’ (walnut) or ‘yòz’ (cheetah).

Convention when writing Pahlavi in the Latin script is to use upper case letters for Aramaic heterograms and lower case letters for spelled Iranian words.

Reference: Hale, Mark. “Pahlavi”. The Ancient Languages of Asia and the Americas, Roger D. Woodward (ed.), pp. 123-136

This article formerly appeared on ScriptSource.