Una lingua che risorge: il pahlavī tra lettura pārsī e filologia occidentale.

The paper deals with the long and challenging history of deciphering Middle Persian scripts, both bookish and inscriptional. This history was matched by an equally long and fruitful translatio studii: such figures as Anquetil Duperron, Martin Haug, Rasmus Rask, Edward West, and Niels Westergaard in their travels furnished Western libraries with a conspicuous number of invaluable manuscripts with which scholarly knowledge of Zoroastrian language and literature commenced. It was a long journey that brought the Middle Persian texts from Northwestern India, from Gujarāt cities such as Bombay, Calcutta, and Surat where Zoroastrian communities of Islamized Īrān had gradually settled, to the capitals of Western philology, London, Oxford, Paris, Munich, Erlangen, and Berlin. This journey corresponded to the encounter of two different methods: on the one hand, the secular philology of the Mazdean dastūrs, accustomed to read in their own way the corpus of religious texts according to very ancient traditions; on the other hand, Western philology, at first timid then increasingly fierce when it turned into scientific linguistics, which accepted, reworked and developed the lesson of their Oriental masters. But differently from all other known cases (e.g., the Indian case), European linguistics did not grasp its own goals immediately and according to a linear progression. On the contrary, scruples and little or no experience with corpora profoundly different from the classical ones led the Orientalists to take a definitely wrong path. It is therefore a story studded with many errors that is traced in detail in the article. From the earliest readings of Iranian-Aramaic heterography as a presumed syllabic script with phonological referents (and the consequent presupposition of pahlavī as a Mischsprache) to the more mature stages, inaugurated by Nöldeke and, later, Salemann, who were able to regain the composite structure of the spelling by assigning the correct Iranian references to Aramaic logograms.