Abstract

Perhaps sometime around the 10th century Pāzand manuscripts started to appear among the Zoroastrian communities in India even though the oldest surviving original manuscripts date back to as early as 15th century. Many philologists such as Friedrich Von Spiegel and E.W. West in the 19th century thought of them as being in a different language than Pahlavi when they first found these texts. However, later in the 20th century scholars dismissed Pāzand as being a different language.

This thesis will analyze a portion of one of these Pāzand texts and determine whether the language of this text was a later regional variety of Pahlavi, another language, or perhaps just a wrong transcription of Pahlavi. In order to do so a Pāzand text will be compared to the exact same text (word by word) in Pahlavi and try to record and analyze all philological differences. In addition I have created a glossary list for both Pāzand and Pahlavi words that occur in the text analyzed. The text chosen for this philological comparison is the Mēnōg- ī Xrad (Spirit of Wisdom), a Zoroastrian religious text.

As part of this project, it will be very important to do a brief comparison with New Persian, since it could be relevant to understand the relationship between Pāzand and Pahlavi. This comparison will try to also answer the question of whether New Persian really is a direct descendant of Pahlavi or not.
One of the most interesting and less ventured grammatical units in these languages is the Ezafe enclitic, a form of a suffix often not written. This thesis would try to also provide a new explanation about Ezafe and how stress patterns could affect the semantic value of it.

Finally, there will be an attempt to establish a rough date for the Mēnōg- ī Xrad text as well as to determine whether the Pāzand version was copied from the Pahlavi version or vice versa.