The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c16.13

v1.c16.13

The dialects of Irān, the language of the earliest Gāthās (Songs) which are attributed to Zoroaster himself, the later dialect of the other surviving parts of the sacred literature of the ancient Persians—the Avesta—and the inscriptions beginning with Darius I about 520 b.c. and best represented in his time but continuing to the last Darius in 338 b.c., are all closely related to the oldest dialect discovered in India, which appears in the hymns of the Rigveda. Not only single words and phrases, but even whole stanzas may be transliterated from the dialect of India into the dialects of Irān without change of vocabulary or construction, though the appearance of the words is altered by the changes which time and isolation have brought about between the dialects east and west of Afghānistān. It is curious to note that the changes are much greater in the dialects that remain in Irān than in this oldest recorded dialect of the migrants into India. The Irānians have disguised their words by changing (as Greek has also done) *s* followed by a vowel at the beginning of words, or between vowels in the middle of words, into *h*: thus the word for 7, the equivalent of the Latin *septem*, the Greek ἑπτά, is in Sanskrit *saptá*, but in Irānian *hapta*. There are many other changes both in vowels and in consonants. In particular it may be noted that one kind of original *g* which appears in Sanskrit as *j* has become in the Irānian dialect *z* or *s* (Greek ἁγνός ‘holy,’ Sanskrit *yajñá-* ‘sacrifice,’ Avesta *yasna*), and a corresponding aspirated sound *gh* which is in Sanskrit *h* has become identified with *g* in Irānian as *z* (Latin *hiems*, Greek χιών, χεῖμα, (δύσ)χιμος, Sanskrit *hima-* in ‘Himālaya,’ Avesta *zyam-*). This loss of aspiration has affected also the other aspirates *bh*, *dh*, which survive in Sanskrit, while Irānian tends in certain combinations to change original consonant-stops into spirants, making the old name of the deity Mitra into Mithra, and from compounds with a second element *-parna* the numerous proper names which we know in Greek transliterations as Artaphernes, Tissaphernes, and the like.