Sogdian language
Extinct Eastern Iranian language of Central Asia
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Through Central Asia, Grammar and Silk Road
The Sogdian language is usually assigned to a Northeastern group of the Iranian languages. No direct evidence of an earlier version of the language ("Old Sogdian") has been found, although mention of the area in the Old Persian inscriptions means that a separate and recognisable Sogdia existed at least since the Achaemenid Empire (559–323 BCE).
Similar to Khotanese, Sogdian may have possessed a more conservative grammar and morphology than Middle Persian. The modern Eastern Iranian language Yaghnobi is the descendant of a dialect of Sogdian spoken around the 8th century in Osrushana, south of Sogdia.
History
During the period of the Tang dynasty (ca. 7th century CE) of China, Sogdian was the lingua franca in Central Asia of the Silk Road, along which it amassed a rich vocabulary of loanwords such as tym 'hotel' from the Middle Chinese /tem/ (Chinese: 店).
The economic and political importance of Sogdian guaranteed its survival in the first few centuries after the Muslim conquest of Sogdia in the early eighth century. A dialect of Sogdian spoken around the 8th century in Osrushana (capital: Bunjikat, near present-day Istaravshan, Tajikistan), a region to the south of Sogdia, developed into the Yaghnobi language and has survived into the 21st century. It is spoken by the Yaghnobi people.
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Discovery of Sogdian texts
The first discovered Sogdian text was the Karabalgasun inscription, but it was not understood until 1909 that it contained text in Sogdian.
Aurel Stein discovered five letters written in Sogdian, known as the "Ancient Letters", in an abandoned watchtower near Dunhuang in 1907, dating to the end of the Western Jin dynasty. The finding of manuscript fragments of the Sogdian language in China's Xinjiang region sparked the study of the language. Robert Gauthiot (the first Buddhist Sogdian scholar) and Paul Pelliot (who explored in Dunhuang and retrieved Sogdian material there) began investigating the Sogdian material that Pelliot had discovered in 1908. Gauthiot published many articles based on his work with Pelliot's material but died during the First World War. One of Gauthiot's most impressive articles was a glossary to the Sogdian text, which he was in the process of completing when he died. This work was continued by Émile Benveniste after Gauthiot's death.
Various Sogdian pieces have been found in the Turfan text corpus by the German Turfan expeditions. These expeditions were controlled by the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. These pieces consist almost entirely of religious works by Manichaean and Christian writers, including translations of the Bible. Most of the Sogdian religious works are from the 9th and 10th centuries.
Dunhuang and Turfan were the two most plentiful sites of Manichean, Buddhist, and Christian Sogdian texts. Sogdiana itself actually contained a much smaller collection of texts, discovered in the early 1930s near Mount Mug in Tajikistan. The texts, related to business, belonged to a minor Sogdian king, Divashtich. They dated back to the time of the Muslim conquest, about 700.
Between 1996 and 2018, a number of inscribed fragments have been found at Kultobe in Kazakhstan. They date back to the Kangju culture, are significantly earlier than the 4th century AD and showcase an archaic state of Sogdian.
In the years between 2003 and 2020, three new bilingual Chinese-Sogdian epitaphs have been discovered and published.
Writing system
Similar to all other writing systems employed for Middle Iranian languages, the Sogdian alphabet ultimately derives from the Aramaic alphabet. Similar to its close relatives, the Pahlavi scripts, written Sogdian contains many logograms or ideograms, which were Aramaic words that were written to represent native spoken ones. The Sogdian script is the direct ancestor of the Old Uyghur alphabet, which is itself the forerunner of the Traditional Mongolian alphabet.
As in other writing systems descended from the Proto-Sinaitic script, there are no special signs for vowels. As in the parent Aramaic system, the consonantal signs ’ y w can be used as matres lectionis for the long vowels [a: i: u:] respectively. However, unlike it, the consonant signs would also sometimes serve to express the short vowels, which could also sometimes be left unexpressed and always are in the parent systems. To distinguish long vowels from short ones, an additional aleph can be written before the sign that denotes the long vowel.
Sogdian also used the Manichaean alphabet, which consists of 29 letters.
In transcribing Sogdian script into Roman letters, Aramaic ideograms are often noted by means of capitals.
Phonology
Consonants
The consonant inventory of Sogdian is as follows (parentheses mark allophones or marginal phonemes):
Vowels
Sogdian has the following simple vowels:
Sogdian also has three rhotacized vowels: ər, ir, ur.
The diphthongs in Sogdian are āi, āu and those whose second element is a rhotacized vowel or a nasal element ṃ.
Morphology
Sogdian has two different sets of endings for so-called 'light' and 'heavy' stems. A stem is heavy if it contains at least one heavy syllable (containing a long vowel or diphthong); stems containing only light vowels are light. In heavy stems, stress falls on the stem, and in light stems, it falls on the suffix or ending.