A literary history of Persia

74 HISTORY OF PERSIAN PHILOLOGYpersonal, demonstrative, interrogative and relative pronouns ;all the numerals from one to ten ;the most common verbs(including the auxiliaries) such as 'to be, to go, to come, towish, to eat, to sleep, to write, &c.' ;almost all the prepositions,adverbs, and conjunctions, and several important terminationsfor the formation of nouns, as well as a large majority of thewords in general (atall events in the Sasanian inscriptions), are"of Semitic origin ; yet in the main such is the case, and" the verbal terminations, the suffixed pronouns and the constructionof the sentence " are often the only Irdnian part ofthe Pahlawi phrase, though they are its essential and characteristicpart. But in addition to this we have a number ofmonstrous, hybrid words, half Aramaic, half Persian, which norational being can imagine were ever really current in speech.Thus the Semitic root meaning " to write " consists of the threeradicals K, T, B, and the third person plural of the imperfectisyektibhn (Arabic, yaktuburi), while the Persian verb isnabishtan y napishtan, or navishtan. The Pahlawi scribe, however,wrote y&ktibun-tan ybut assuredly never so read it : tohim yektiblin, though a significant inflected word in Aramaic,was a mere logogram or ideogram standing for napish-, towhich he then added the appropriate Persian termination. Solikewise for the Persian word mard^ "man," he wrote theSemitic gabra, but when he wished the alternative form mardumto be read, he indicated this by the addition of the " phoneticcomplement," and wrote gabra-um.The analogiesto this extraordinary procedure which exist inAssyrian have already been pointed out.languageIn the older Turdnianof Akkad "father" was adda. "When theAssyrians," says Haug, " wished to write c father,' they usedthe first character, ad or at, of adda, but pronounced it ab twhich was their own word for * father ' ;and to express'myfather,' they wrote atuya ybut read it abuya ; u being theAssyrian nominative termination, and ya the suffix meaning*my,' which, in the writing, were added to the foreign word