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Contents

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2026

Kevin T. van Bladel
Kevin T. van Bladel
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut

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Type
Chapter
Information
Ancient Persian
A Linguistic History
 , pp. vii - viii
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2026
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This content is Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/cclicenses/

Contents

  1. List of Maps

  2. List of Tables

  3. Acknowledgments

  4. Introduction

    1. Old Persian, Middle Persian, New Persian

    2. Hypotheses about the “Simple” Persian Language

    3. Linguistic History and Historical Linguistics

    4. More about Linguistic History

    5. Terminology

    6. Plan of the Book

  5. 1The Transformation of Old Persian

    1. The Character of Old Persian Grammar

    2. Earlier Scholarly Explanations

    3. From Old Persian to Middle Persian

    4. The Symptoms of Middle Persian in Late Achaemenian Royal Inscriptions

    5. A Simpler Form of Persian

  6. 2A Linguistic-Historical Model: Social Factors in Grammatical Reduction, Imposition, and Adoption

    1. Grammatical Reduction: Social Factors in the Loss of Inflection

    2. Three Intergenerational Patterns of Language Acquisition

    3. “Contact Languages” as Comparanda

    4. Varieties of Contact Languages

    5. State and Process in Contact Linguistics and Linguistic History

    6. Reduction and the Transfer of Features as Concomitant Factors

    7. Human Agency in the Transfer of Features and Grammatical Reduction: Three Syndromes

    8. Decreolization

    9. The Pace of Language Change and “Modern” Ancient Languages: A Note for Historical Linguistics

    10. Exoterogeny and Esoterogeny

    11. Ramifications

  7. 3Middle Persian as a Byproduct of the Social Conditions of the Achaemenian Empire

    1. A Nation Morally Corrupted?

    2. What Happened to Old Persian? The Linguistic-Historical Model Alone

    3. Purely Structural Linguistic Alternatives?

    4. Imperial Persian, Heterogeneous Persians

    5. Fighters and Laborers for the Persians

    6. Domestic Personnel of the Persians

    7. The Testimony of Material Culture

    8. The Testimony of the Language of the Late Achaemenian Inscriptions

    9. Dominant Ethno-Class or Domestic Melting Pot?

    10. Modern Terms for Imperial Population Mixture

  8. 4Common and Remote Varieties of Iranic-Language Speech

    1. Parthian and Bactrian

    2. Systemic Similarities between Middle Persian, Parthian, and Bactrian

    3. Comparisons with Languages from the Outer Achaemenian Domain and Beyond

    4. The Hypothesis of Central Iranic and Areal Features

    5. An Achaemenian Common Tongue?

    6. The Putative Role of Aramaic as an Achaemenian Lingua Franca

    7. Socially Remote and Socially Common Iranic Languages

  9. Conclusion

  10. References

  11. Index

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