Khwarazmian (Khwarezmian, Khorezmian, Chorasmian) is an extinct East Iranian language[3][4][5][6] closely related to Sogdian. The language was spoken in the area of Khwarezm (Chorasmia), centered in the lower Amu Darya south of the Aral Sea (the northern part of the modern Republic of Uzbekistan, and the adjacent areas of Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan).
The Eastern Iranian languages are a subgroup of the Iranian languages emerging in Middle Iranian times. The Avestan language is often classified as early Eastern Iranian. The largest living Eastern Iranian language is Pashto, with some 50–60 million speakers between the Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan and the Indus River in Pakistan. As opposed to the Middle Western Iranian dialects, the Middle Eastern Iranian preserves word-final syllables.
The Sogdian language was an Eastern Iranian language spoken in the Central Asian region of Sogdia, located in modern-day Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, as well as some Sogdian immigrant communities in ancient China. Sogdian is one of the most important Middle Iranian languages, along with Bactrian, Khotanese Saka, Middle Persian, and Parthian. It possesses a large literary corpus.
The Amu Darya, also called the Amu or Amo River, and historically known by its Latin name Oxus and Greek Ὦξος, is a major river in Central Asia. It is formed by the junction of the Vakhsh and Panj rivers, in the Tigrovaya Balka Nature Reserve on the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan, and flows from there north-westwards into the southern remnants of the Aral Sea. In ancient times, the river was regarded as the boundary between Greater Iran and Turan.
Knowledge of Khwarazmian is limited to its Middle Iranian stage and, as with Sogdian, little is known of its ancient form.
From the writings of the great Khwarazmian scholars, Al-Biruni and Zamakhshari, we know that the language was in use at least until the 13th century, when it was gradually replaced by Persian for the most part, as well as several dialects of Turkic.[7]
Abū Rayḥān Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad Al-Bīrūnī, known as Biruni or Al-Biruni in English language, was an Iranian scholar and polymath. He was from Khwarazm – a region which encompasses modern-day western Uzbekistan, and northern Turkmenistan.
Persian, also known by its endonym Farsi, is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages. It is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken and used officially within Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan in three mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Iranian Persian, Dari Persian and Tajiki Persian. It is also spoken natively in the Tajik variety by a significant population within Uzbekistan, as well as within other regions with a Persianate history in the cultural sphere of Greater Iran. It is written officially within Iran and Afghanistan in the Persian alphabet, a derivation of the Arabic script, and within Tajikistan in the Tajik alphabet, a derivation of Cyrillic.
Other than the astronomical terms used by Al-Biruni, our other sources of Khwarazmian include Zamakhshari's Arabic–Persian–Khwarazmian dictionary and several legal texts that use Khwarazmian terms to explain certain legal concepts.[7]
Astronomy is a natural science that studies celestial objects and phenomena. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and evolution. Objects of interest include planets, moons, stars, nebulae, galaxies, and comets. Relevant phenomena include supernova explosions, gamma ray bursts, quasars, blazars, pulsars, and cosmic microwave background radiation. More generally, astronomy studies everything that originates outside Earth's atmosphere. Cosmology is a branch of astronomy. It studies the Universe as a whole.
The noted scholar W.B. Henning was preparing a dictionary of Khwarazmian when he died, leaving it unfinished.[citation needed]
Writing system
Before the advance of Islam in Transoxiana (early 8th century), Khwarazmian was written in a script close to that of Sogdian and Pahlavi with its roots in the imperial Aramaic script. From the few surviving examples of this script on coins and artifacts it has been observed that written Khwarazmian included Aramaic logograms or ideograms, that is Aramaic words written to represent native spoken ones.
Islam is an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion teaching that there is only one God (Allah), and that Muhammad is a messenger of God. It is the world's second-largest religion with over 1.9 billion followers or 24.4% of the world's population, commonly known as Muslims. Muslims make up a majority of the population in 50 countries. Islam teaches that God is merciful, all-powerful, and unique, and has guided mankind through prophets, revealed scriptures and natural signs. The primary scriptures of Islam are the Quran, believed to be the verbatim word of God, and the teachings and normative examples of Muhammad.
Transoxiana, known in Arabic sources as Mā Warāʾ an-Nahr and in Persian as Farârud, is the ancient name used for the portion of Central Asia corresponding approximately with modern-day Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, southern Kyrgyzstan, and southwest Kazakhstan. Geographically, it is the region between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. The area had been known to the ancient Iranians as Turan, a term used in the Persian national epic Shahnameh, and to the Romans as Transoxania. The Arabic term Mā warāʼ an-Nahr passed into Persian literary usage and stayed on until post-Mongol times.
After the advance of Islam, Khwarazmian was written using an adapted version of the Perso-Arabic alphabet with a few extra signs to reflect specific Khwarazmian sounds, such as the letter څ, which represents /ts/ and /dz/, as in the traditional Pashto orthography.[8]
The Persian alphabet, also known as the Perso-Arabic alphabet, is a writing system used for the Persian language spoken in Iran and Afghanistan. The Persian language spoken in Tajikistan is written in the Tajik alphabet, a modified version of Cyrillic alphabet since the Soviet era.
↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Khwarezmian". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
↑ Encyclopedia Iranica, "The Chorasmian Language", D.N.Mackenzie. Online access at June, 2011:
↑ Andrew Dalby, Dictionary of Languages: the definitive reference to more than 400 languages, Columbia University Press, 2004, pg 278.
↑ MacKenzie, D. N. "Khwarazmian Language and Literature," in E. Yarshater ed. Cambridge History of Iran, Vol. III, Part 2, Cambridge 1983, pp. 1244–1249.
The ancient Aramaic alphabet was adapted from the Phoenician alphabet and became a distinct script by the 8th century BC. It was used to write the Aramaic language and had displaced the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, itself a derivative of the Phoenician alphabet, for the writing of Hebrew. The letters all represent consonants, some of which are also used as matres lectionis to indicate long vowels.
Aramaic is a language or group of languages belonging to the Semitic subfamily of the Afroasiatic language family. More specifically, it is part of the Northwest Semitic group, which also includes the Canaanite languages such as Hebrew and Phoenician. The Aramaic alphabet was widely adopted for other languages and is ancestral to the Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic alphabets. During its approximately 3,100 years of written history, Aramaic has served variously as a language of administration of empires, as a language of divine worship and religious study, and as the spoken tongue of a number of Semitic peoples from the Near East.
Darī or Dari Persian or synonymously Farsi is a variety of the Persian language spoken in Afghanistan. Dari is the term officially recognized and promoted since 1964 by the Afghan government for the Persian language, hence, it is also known as Afghan Persian in many Western sources. This has resulted in a naming dispute. Many Persian speakers in Afghanistan prefer and use the name "Farsi" and say the term Dari has been forced on them by the dominant Pashtun ethnic group as an attempt to distance Afghans from their cultural, linguistic and historical ties to the Persian-speaking nations, which includes Iran and Tajikistan.
Khwarazm, or Chorasmia, is a large oasis region on the Amu Darya river delta in western Central Asia, bordered on the north by the (former) Aral Sea, on the east by the Kyzylkum desert, on the south by the Karakum desert, and on the west by the Ustyurt Plateau. It was the center of the Iranian Khwarazmian civilization, and a series of kingdoms such as the Afrighid dynasty, whose capitals were Kath, Gurganj and – from the 16th century on – Khiva. Today Khwarazm belongs partly to Uzbekistan, partly to Kazakhstan and partly to Turkmenistan.
The Khwarazmiandynasty was a Persianate Sunni Muslim dynasty of Turkic mamluk origin. The dynasty ruled large parts of Central Asia and Iran in the approximate period of 1077 to 1231, first as vassals of the Seljuqs and the Qara-Khitan, and later as independent rulers, up until the Mongol invasion of Khwarezmia in the 13th century. The dynasty spanned 2.3 million square kilometers.
The Sogdian alphabet was originally used for the Sogdian language, a language in the Iranian family used by the people of Sogdia. The alphabet is derived from Syriac, a descendant script of the Aramaic alphabet. The Sogdian alphabet is one of three scripts used to write the Sogdian language, the others being the Manichaean alphabet and the Syriac alphabet. It was used throughout Central Asia, from the edge of Iran in the west, to China in the east, from approximately 100–1200 A.D.
Middle Persian or Pahlavi, also known by its endonym as Parsik, is a Western Middle Iranian language which became the literary language of the Sasanian Empire. For some time after the Sasanian collapse, Middle Persian continued to function as a prestige language. It descended from Old Persian, the language of Achaemenid Empire, and is the linguistic ancestor of Modern Persian.
Abu al-Qasim Mahmud ibn Umar al-Zamakhshari, known widely as al-Zamakhshari, also called Jar Allah, was a medieval Muslim scholar of Persian origin, who subscribed to the Muʿtazilite theological doctrine, who was born in Khwarezmia, but lived most of his life in Bukhara, Samarkand, and Baghdad. He was a great authority on the Arabic language as well as a rationalist theologian.
Western Neo-Aramaic, more commonly referred to as Siryon, is a modern Aramaic language. Today, it is only spoken in three villages in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains of western Syria. Western Neo-Aramaic is the only living language among the Western Aramaic languages. All other Neo-Aramaic languages are of the Eastern branch.
Frahang-ī Pahlavīg is the title of an anonymous dictionary of unknown date of (mostly) Aramaic logograms with Middle Persian translations and transliterations. The glossary was previously known to Indian Zoroastrians as the mna-xvatay, a name derived from the first two words of the first entry/lemma. The Frahang-i Pahlavig should not be confused with the Frahang-i Oim-evak, which is a glossary of Avestan language terms.
The Iranian or Iranic languages are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family that are spoken natively by the Iranian peoples.
In a right-to-left, top-to-bottom script, writing starts from the right of the page and continues to the left. This can be contrasted against left-to-right writing systems, where writing starts from the left of the page and continues to the right.
Manichaean script is an abjad-based writing system rooted in the Semitic family of alphabets and associated with the spread of Manichaean religion from southwest to central Asia and beyond, beginning in the 3rd century CE. It bears a sibling relationship to early forms of the Pahlavi script, both systems having developed from the Imperial Aramaic alphabet, in which the Achaemenid court rendered its particular, official dialect of the Aramaic language. Unlike Pahlavi, Manichaean script reveals influences from Sogdian script, which in turn descends from the Syriac branch of Aramaic. Manichaean script is so named because Manichaean texts attribute its design to Mani himself. Middle Persian is written with this alphabet.
David Neil MacKenzie FBA was a scholar of Iranian languages.
The name Khwarezmian may refer to:
The Afrighids were a native Chorasmian Iranian dynasty who ruled over the ancient kingdom of Chorasmia until 995 AD. Over time, they were under the suzerainty of the Sassanid Empire, the Hephthalite Empire, the Göktürk Khaganate, the Umayyad Caliphate and the Samanid Empire.
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