The Iranian languages or Iranic languages are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-

European language family that are spoken natively by the Iranian peoples, predominantly in the Iranian
Plateau.

Iranian branch fall into two divisions, an eastern and a western, represented respectively by Avestan and
Old Persian.

avestan is the name of the language of the avesta the avesta in turn is a body of texts which zoroastrian
priests and also lay people recite in a range of different rituals of their religion

the indo-iranian people did not write. their culture was intrinsically oral. even today aspiring zoroastrian
priests have to learn the recitation of the rituals by heart and they do so from early childhood onwards

the avestan script has two main features one is that it is an artificial creation which happened at a
certain point in time the second characteristic of the western script is that it represents sound not
meaning the script is phonetic not phonemic those who invented the script strove to write what they
heard not what they understood because they didn't understand much of their western language
anymore at that point the western alphabet has at least 53 letters and notes a great deal of phonetic
variations twelve of the arrested letters are directly taken from the cursive form of the book pachlavi
script which was current at the time when the script was invented by then the zoroastrian clergy had
used the pakhlavi script for many centuries to write a wide range of texts in their own middle persian
language they might well also have used it to write the paklavi translation interpretation of the avesta
and occasionally also are western words like the paklavi script the avestan script runs from right to left
in semitic fashion but in contrast to paglavi the avestan script is fully vocalized and the letters are not
connected paclavi alphabet only has 13 letters the priests who invented the arrester script had to
procure additional letters now how did they proceed in principle they proceeded in two different ways
one was by adding diacritic marks to existing letters of the paglavi script both book

Old Persian - the language used in the cuneiform inscriptions of Achaemenian dynasty and the
vernacular of the Achaemenian elite.

A later form of this language, found in the early centuries of our era, is known as Middle Iranian or
Pahlavi, the official language of church and state during the dynasty of the Sassanids