later forms are an (Manichaean ՚n), and meh (Pahlavi ms and Manichaean myh); indeed, some scholars have reconstructed them as monosyllabic any, mahy even for Middle Persian. Scripts Middle Persian has been written in a number of different scripts. The corpora in different scripts also exhibit other linguistic differences that are partly due to their different ages, dialects and scribal traditions. The Pahlavi scripts are abjads derived from the imperial variety of the Aramaic alphabet used in the chancelleries of the Achaemenid Empire. As is typical of abjads, they express primarily the consonants in a word form. What sets them apart from other abjads, however, is the use of Heterograms, and more specifically Aramaeograms, i.e. words written in Aramaic (sometimes, in later periods, with distortions) but pronounced in Middle Persian: e.g. LY (Aramaic 'to me') for man 'me, I'. There were about a thousand of these in the Book Pahlavi variety. In addition, their spelling remained very conservative, expressing the pronunciation of the Arsacid period. The two most important subvarieties are: Inscriptional Pahlavi, used in the inscriptions of Sassanid kings and officials from the 3rd-4th centuries CE. The 22 letters are written separately and still relatively well distinguished compared to later versions: the only formal coincidences of original Aramaic signs are the pair m and q and the triplet w, ʿ and r. Book Pahlavi, used primarily in Zoroastrian books from the 5th century CE on. Most texts are thought to reflect the stage of the language from the 6th to the 10th centuries CE. (6th-7th centuries for the translations of the Avesta and perhaps some didactic and entertainment literature, 9-10th centuries for the dogmatic and legal texts that form most of the corpus) This is the script that the overwhelming majority of Middle Persian texts is recorded in. A cursive script characterised by many ligatures and by the formal coincidence of originally different Aramaic letters, reducing the number to just 14 distinct signs. Now, also n coincides with the triplet w = ʿ = r, and in addition, another triplet g, d and y merges too, as does the pair ʾ and ḥ. Aramaic ṭ had also disappeared. In later times, some mergers were disambiguated by means of diacritic signs, following the example of the Arabic abjad: thus, g, d and y were distinguished again; however, this wasn't applied consistently. Other known Pahlavi varieties are the early Pahlavi found