Psalter Pahlavi is a
cursive abjad
An abjad (, ar, أبجد; also abgad) is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with other alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels ...
that was used for writing
Middle Persian
Middle Persian or Pahlavi, also known by its endonym Pārsīk or Pārsīg () in its later form, is a Western Middle Iranian language which became the literary language of the Sasanian Empire. For some time after the Sasanian collapse, Middle ...
on paper; it is thus described as one of the
Pahlavi scripts
Pahlavi is a particular, exclusively written form of various Middle Iranian languages. The essential characteristics of Pahlavi are:
*the use of a specific Aramaic-derived script;
*the incidence of Aramaic words used as heterograms (called '' ...
.
It was written right to left, usually with spaces between words.
It takes its name from the
Pahlavi Psalter
The Pahlavi Psalter is the name given to a 12-page non-contiguous section of a Middle Persian translation of a Syriac version of the Book of Psalms.
The Pahlavi Psalter was discovered in 1905 by the second German Turpan expedition under Albert ...
, part of the
Psalms
The Book of Psalms ( or ; he, תְּהִלִּים, , lit. "praises"), also known as the Psalms, or the Psalter, is the first book of the ("Writings"), the third section of the Tanakh, and a book of the Old Testament. The title is derived ...
translated from Syriac to Middle Persian and found in what is now western China.
Encyclopædia Iranica: Pahlavi Psalter
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Letters
Punctuation
Four different large section-ending punctuation marks were used:
Numbers
Psalter Pahlavi had its own numerals
A numeral is a figure, symbol, or group of figures or symbols denoting a number. It may refer to:
* Numeral system used in mathematics
* Numeral (linguistics), a part of speech denoting numbers (e.g. ''one'' and ''first'' in English)
* Numerical d ...
:
Some numerals have joining behavior (with both numerals and letters).
Unicode block
Psalter Pahlavi script was added to the Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...
Standard in June, 2014 with the release of version 7.0.
The Unicode block is U+10B80–U+10BAF:
Notes
References
Abjad writing systems
Iranian inscriptions
Middle Persian
Persian scripts
Obsolete writing systems
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