Khwarazmian language

Khwarazmian

Chorasmian
Native to| Khwarezm
Region| Central Asia
Era| 550 BCE – 1200 AD[1]

Language family

Indo-European

* Indo-Iranian
* Iranian
* Eastern
* Khwarazmian

Writing system

| Aramaic alphabet, Sogdian alphabet, Pahlavi script, Arabic script
Language codes
ISO 639-3| `xco`

Linguist List

| `xco`
Glottolog| `khwa1238`[2]

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).

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]

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]

The noted scholar W.B. Henning was preparing a dictionary of Khwarazmian when he died, leaving it unfinished.[citation needed]

## Contents

* 1 Writing system
* 2 See also
* 3 Notes
* 4 External links

## 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.

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]

## See also

* Afrighids
* al-Khwārizmī
* Ancient Iranian peoples
* Al-Biruni
* Central Asia
* Iranian peoples
* Iranian Languages
* Khwarezm
* Zoroastrianism
* Zamakhshari

## Notes

1. ↑ Khwarazmian at MultiTree on the Linguist List
2. ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds (2017). "Khwarezmian". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/khwa1238.
3. ↑ Encyclopedia Iranica, "The Chorasmian Language", D.N.Mackenzie. Online access at June, 2011: [1]
4. ↑ Andrew Dalby, Dictionary of Languages: the definitive reference to more than 400 languages, Columbia University Press, 2004, pg 278.
5. ↑ MacKenzie, D. N. "Khwarazmian Language and Literature," in E. Yarshater ed. Cambridge History of Iran, Vol. III, Part 2, Cambridge 1983, pp. 1244–1249.
6. ↑ Encyclopædia Britannica, "Iranian languages" (Retrieved on 29 December 2008)
7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 CHORASMIA iii. The Chorasmian Language
8. ↑ THE KHWAREZMIAN GLOSSARY—I, D. N. MacKenzie Link

## External links

* Encyclopedia Iranica, "The Chorasmian language" by D.N. Mackenzie
* https://web.archive.org/web/20040201160726/http://iranianlanguages.com/
* https://web.archive.org/web/20041009124244/http://www.iranologie.com/history/ilf.html

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