Thread by @iwsfutcmd

I often describe Pahlavi as the worst writing system ever invented.

Let's take a perfectly-serviceable writing system for a completely different language (Aramaic) and adapt it for our language (Middle Persian). We'll call this new script "Pahlavi".

https://twitter.com/azforeman/status/1666549104124493824

Aramaic doesn't really write all the vowels, only consonants, but that's OK for Aramaic, because through a quirk of Semitic grammar, consonants carry most of the semantics. But our language, Middle Persian, is Indo-European and *does* carry a lot of semantic weight in vowels.

This is why when Greek (IE) borrowed writing from Phoenician (Sem.), it repurposed a bunch of the consonants that Greek didn't have to use as vowels.

Pahlavi didn't do that, though, it just carried on not writing vowels.

But what about consonants that Middle Persian has that Aramaic doesn't? For Greek they made up some fancy new letters like ‹Φ› and ‹Χ›. Or for Dutch the used digraphs like ‹ch›.

Pahlavi didn't do that, no. Aramaic has no /f/, so Pahlavi writes /f/ identically to /p/.

There are a lot of Aramaic consonants that aren't present in Middle Persian. This means, yes, about half of the 22 Aramaic letters are unused by Pahlavi (sort of, more on that later), but the letters that *are* used are *still* ambiguous.

But let's make things worse.
Let's start writing some of the letters so similarly that you can't tell the difference between them. In Book Pahlavi (the most common form), they shaved Aramaic's 22 consonants down to 13.

This means, e.g., /g/, /d/, and /y/ are all written with the same letter, despite them being different in Aramaic.

But let's make things worse.
Book Pahlavi is a cursive script. When two letters come together, they can look identical to a completely different letter. Think about how cursive "iu" might, without the dot, look like "ui". Book Pahlavi has no such dots. Good luck.

All this means that the Middle Persian word for God, "Ohrmazd", could be just as easily read (and occasionally mispronounced as!) "Anhoma".

But let's make things worse.
Like all languages, the sounds of Middle Persian changed over time. But Pahlavi didn't change, which means you write words like "šab" ("night") as "špa", because it *used* to be pronounced with a /p/.

But let's make things *far* worse.
So I lied up there. You don't write "šab" as "špa". No, you write it "LYLYA". What. Well, that's because "lēləyā" is the Aramaic word for "night", and much like how Japanese borrows Chinese characters to write Japanese words,

Pahlavi borrows whole Aramaic *words* to write Middle Persian words. How do you know to pronounce it "šab" instead of "līlīa" (or even "rīlīa", or "ragulda" or... ugh) or something? You don't, you just have to know that.

How do we know this isn't just a borrowing from Aramaic? Because we have Middle Persian dictionaries that say "remember that when you see 'lylya', you have to read it as 'šab'." Pahlavi is *full* of these "aramaeograms", even the word for "az" ("from") is written "MN".

But the real stinker is, after the Persian literati realized this mess would cause people to horribly mispronounce the sacred texts, they invented a new script based on Pahlavi we call "Avestan" that wrote *all* of the sounds, consonants & vowels, to extreme phonetic detail.

Seriously, it goes so far that we don't really know why certain letters are distinguished, but they must have been pronounced subtly differently in the past.

Why wouldn't they use this clearly superior system to write Middle Persian instead of friggin' Pahlavi?

Avestan was invented primarily to write their sacred language (also called Avestan), not the everyday language, so maybe you're thinking it's too sacred for plebian Middle Persian.
Nope!

There's a tradition of writing Middle Persian using Avestan called "Pazend", but it was primarily only used to write commentaries on the sacred texts, and...

remember how I said there were dictionaries that told you how to pronounce the aramaeograms? The pronunciations? They were written in Pazend!

WHY DIDN'T THEY JUST SWITCH TO USING PAZEND ALL THE TIME‽‽

In the past, I'd thought that the introduction of the Arabic script to write Persian was an imposition that occurred due to the introduction of Islam, but it wasn't just that, it was, despite still not writing those short vowels, an actual step up!

Pahlavi does have two things going for it though.

One, it is really pretty.

Two, whenever you write "Ahriman" (the Zoroastrian personification of evil), you always write it upside-down

That's pretty awesome.

let's just say there's a reason why despite Book Pahlavi being an incredibly important historical script, it *still* isn't encoded in Unicode. because we're still not totally sure how to do it! despite many of our experts being Persians!