Comparison of Linguistic Structures of Jāmāsp Nāmag in Three Iranian Textual Traditions

Abstract

Jāmāsp Nāmag is one of the significant texts in the ancient Iranian religious and literary tradition and serves as a principal source of Zoroastrian eschatology. Framed as a dialogue between Wištāsp and Jāmāsp, it contains prophecies regarding the future of humankind and the cosmos. This text exists in three languages—Pahlavi, Pazand, and Persian—and examining its linguistic structures can contribute to understanding the syntactic developments of Middle and New Iranian languages. The present study, aiming to analyze and compare the grammatical structures in the Pahlavi section of the work, investigates verbs, enclitic pronouns, and ezāfe constructions. The research approach is descriptive–analytical and has been conducted using library sources. Modi’s Pahlavi version was selected as the base text and compared with other versions, such as the works of West, Benveniste, Messina, and Assemani. The findings indicate that verbs in the Pahlavi text predominantly appear in compound forms, which is indicative of the syntactic dynamism of the Pahlavi language. Enclitic pronouns play a significant role in sentence cohesion, often occupying subject and object positions. The ezāfe constructions also exhibit a complex and multi-layered structure, which, compared to the Pazand and Persian texts, have undergone simplification. These differences reflect historical processes in language evolution and the transmission of religious concepts within the Zoroastrian tradition.