Introduction - At the beginning of the course a brief introduction to history, literature, language, and script of Middle Persian will be given. The position of the Middle Persian among the Iranian languages will be explained and interesting points related to the development of Persian will be discussed. The history of Middle Persian script, which is indeed a very ambiguous one, will be given. Providing a context for the language will help students to better focus on the important points, and understand the character of Middle Persian.
Grammar - On the first day we will almost entirely dedicate our time to introducing the main characteristics of Middle Persian grammar, its main differences from Middle Persian, be they related to phonology or grammar. This will prepare the ground for the reading of the text. Points discussed will include the personal pronouns and enclitic pronouns, the structure of the verb, tenses, structure of the sentence, prepositions, the postposition rāy, phonology, etc. More details will be given in the coming lessons.
Unlike Old Persian, Middle Persian has a more analytical structure, which is characterized by the lack of grammatical gender or cases. Slight traces of the existence of an oblique case (developed from OP Genitive) can be seen in earlier texts, though they tend to disappear by the time of writing of most of our texts.
Some grammatical points:
Personal pronouns - Middle Persian has 6 pers. pronouns (an/man, tō, ōy, amāh, ašmāh, awēšān), similar to those of New Persian, which have their corresponding enclitic pronouns (-m, -t, -š, -mān, -tān, -šān).
Verbs - Like New Persian, Middle Persian verbs have two stems, those of the present and those of the preterite (past).
Postposition rāy - Unlike New Persian, the postposition rāy in MP is generally used with the meaning “for”.
Prior reading - Chapters I, II, and III from P. O. Skjærvø’s “Introduction to Pahlavi” (available online).