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The Parthian Pahlavî Project
“They ruled for more than three centuries, out of the four that was marked by the warrior-king Arsaces after slaying Andragoras. The Parthians ought to then be renowned after winning wars against Sacae, Seleucids, Bactrians and later the Romans. This is however not the case, as almost no surviving literati or textual corpus have been found from the colloquially Partho-Sassanian period. Thus the origins, but also the lineage of the Parthians remains obscure, and only referenced to in Graeco-Roman, Chinese and Indian sources. One may instantly wonder, how does one even start an effort in a voice-mod, let alone see through such an attempt when resources are sparse?
After almost nine months of studies in fragments and religious texts written in Old Persian, and Middle Persian (Pahlavî) as well as Pârsî as emerged from Ferdôwsî's national epic, the Shâhnâmêh, the audacious effort has from a handful of seeds blossomed into a garden. Extensive reading of sources such as the Bundâhîshn, Dênkârt, Kârnâmag-î Ardashîr-î Pâpakân, and commentaries of the Zend of Avestâ, in synchronization with the highly abused "Concise Pahlavî Dictionary" written by Prof. MacKenzie (It's concise alright...) and in comparative studying with fragments of inventories and dialogue sheets have proven to be an effective, albeit repeatitive method in understanding the structure of the language. As a native speaker, it is truly fascinating how truly alike the Middle Persian is to the Modern Persian, in spite of a significantly Arabicized vocabulary to the latter.
Another significant challenge was to adapt the Middle Persian, or largely Sassanian Pahlavî to the Parthian period in a homogenous manner in order to cover the four centuries of their political power era. As such the reconstruction contains residue from the previous Old Persian, which would mainly apply to early units; The Parthian Pahlavî was similar to the Old Persian language due to the fact that the Pahlavî they spoke resembled a mix of the Medean and Scythian tongue. In other words, the Parthians should be credited for conceiving the very basis of the Modern Persian language; A native speaker could with some effort understand Pahlavî, in difference to the Old Persian which more resembled Sanskrit. The ideal would have been to have some form of knowledge on the native Pârnî language; It is drastically different from the later Parthian language due to the fact that they belong to somewhat different branches of the Iranian language group. However due to an extreme scarcity of any representation of the Pârnî language, such ambitions were scrapped early on. This immediately lead to the choice of the Pahlavî/Middle Persian language. After all the player selects the Pahlavân for the sole reason of recreating a projected Persian Empire, and re-achieving what the Parthians did more than 2,000 years ago.
As for the effort within EB to reconstruct the Middle Persian language, it has been a labour of love which today stands finished in the form of a textual corpus of commands for the battle-field. The ambition does not finish there, but a separate chart for the campaign map will be composed, as will battle speeches. It is a premiere and a first time in the history of multimedia that a rendition of the Pahlavî language has ever been attempted and Europa Barbarorum takes great pride in breaking new grounds in the quest for achieving the status as a historically accurate and realistic simulator of the Hellenistic world. In combination with the Punic, Ancient Greek, Latin and Gallic voice-mods, in the humble opinion of the undersigned, no other effort have boasted such an extravagant spectrum of languages. It is a giant leap from the epic Hollywood movies, where accents were used to emphasize ethnic diversity. One must truly understand the implication of a bold attempt in reconstructing the poorly understood language of an entity which dominated the political scene of the post-Hellenistic Greater Iran for over eight centuries.
Naturally, besides the boasting, as with all voluntary works with limited verification, intellectual honesty is in place; We make no guarantees that the voice-mod of an extremely obscure and poorly attested language may be completely accurate. A dictionary with barely 4,000 entries had to be abused to death before significant progress could be made
So what happens afterwards, one may think in boring, legal context. For now, the project is the work-in-progress property of the Europa Barbarorum team, however once the voice-mod is complete and in-game, the textual corpus will become a public release available to anyone who wishes to make use of it.
Thanks go to Spurius_Brontosaurus, mAIOR and Kambiz for their interest and participation in the project, their enthusiasm provides the light of this frail candle of a dream in unveiling the greatness of Ancient Iranian culture ”
--The Persian Cataphract”
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