In the previous lessons, you learned about all the entirety of the Avestan alphabet, and transliterated sentences in Avestan, (which is good practice, since reading Pazend in fundamental to learning Middle Persian.) In this lesson, we will continue by transliterating in Pazend, a writing system used to write in Middle Persian. This lesson will be the first lesson for actually reading Middle Persian, so for native speakers more "Persian" words will be seen in contrast to Avestan.

Specifically, we will be transliterating the entirety of Afrin-i Buzorgan, a Zoroastrian prayer often recited at ceremonies, with the prayer referring to great figures belonging to ancient Iran (hence the name "Afrin-i Buzorgan.")

I would like to credit the late Ervad Edalji Kersāspji Antiā for his publication "Pazend texts" published in 1909, from which I am transcribing said texts.

Author's note: Occasionally, I use the ZWNJ (Zero-width non-joiner) character to divide certain characters to prevent them from combining together in order to stay faithful to the original text.

Afrin-i Buzorgan

Connections with Modern Persian

List of some Middle Persian words extracted from the source and their modern Persian equivalents.