نامه فرهنگستان
سال دوازدهم شماره 4 (شهریور 1391)

In almost all manuscripts of Saʻdi’s Kullīyāt (collected works), one finds 18 lines composed in old Shirāzi dialect, combined with 18 lines in Arabic and 18 in Persian. These trilingual verses are called muθallaθāt. The Shirāzi part of muθallaθāt is almost corrupted in the majority of the manuscripts. In this paper, the author tries to edit and give a translation together with linguistic notes of this part of the verses, using the best and oldest manuscripts.

Yašts are a collection of twenty one hymns in Avestan. In these hymns old Iranian divinities are invoked. Usually among these hymns, old stories and myths are expressed in a short and brief form. The more complete forms of these stories can be found in Pahlavi texts, the Shāhnāme and the Islamic sources dealing with Iran. The story of Pāurva is one of the legends mentioned in Ābān Yašt (verses 61-65). According to these verses, Pāurva is a well-natured man, so that Ferēdōn aids him and Arəduuī Sūrā Anāhitā makes his wish come true. The name 4 Iranian Languages and Dialects 1 Summary of ArticlesPāurva is also attested in the Avestan part of the Pahlavi text Pursišnīhā. Differently, in this text he is a wicked person who wants to hurt Dahmān āfrīn (the god of blessing). It seems that we are dealing with two different stories with namesake characters, or maybe there was a single old story which was forgotten little by little and then mingled with a Mesopotamian epic, as a result, a hero was changed to an anti-hero.

This article consists of four independent notes, which treat at different length some middle Persian words and passages. The first note proposes an etymology for Persian farāvān whose etymology is so far unknown; in the author’s view, it comes from Middle Persian fragān. The second is a reappraisal of a Manichaean Middle Persian passage related to epistemology, and an attempt to correct former translations and interpretations of thepassage. The third shows how the meaning of Middle Persian saxwan, Persian soxan, has changed from speech to work in the Shāhnāma, and considers, in brief, some other semantic changes of the word. The fourth, a discussion about Arabic qahramān, suggests that this word, though Iranian (better Parthian) in origin, is more probably an Aramaic loanword in Arabic, not a (Middle) Persian one.

The present paper is about the discovery and reading of a newly found Pahlavi funerary inscription from Kāzerun. This inscription, as one of the many inscriptions of this type, has been discovered at the rich area of Iranian Languages and Dialects 1 5 Summary of Articles Kāzerun. The inscription dating to the beginning of the Islamic era, belongs to a person named Xwarxšēd Gušnasp.

It is that small space of time between 619 and 629 A.D. that supplies us, from Egypt, with a great number of documents of papyri and parchment in Middle Persian language and script. Collections of Pahlavi papyri are spread over various parts of the world, mostly in Europe. These documents contain names of persons and places, lists of goods and so on. These texts give us some information about juridical, military and economic life in Egypt under the Sassanians. In this article some general information is given about these documents, their importance from different points of view for Iranian culture and languages, their collections, characteristics of writings, their contents, and finally transcriptions, transliterations and translations of some of the texts.

طThis article looks at the development process of the two variants of MP abstract noun suffixes -išn and -išt, also MP infinitive suffixes -dan/-tan. Historical considerations and the same origin make it possible to deal with both -išn and -dan/-tan simultaneously. Also we take a glance at NP element شن ° in words like. پاداش

Baxtiyari is one of the Southwestern dialects of Iran and together with other Lori dialects and Persian has been derived from Middle Persian, which itself has been derived from Old Persian. The purpose of this paper is to provide the etymology of some Baxtiyari words. Under each item, after the explanation of the morphological structure and sound changes, the etymology of the word is described and its cognates in other Iranian languages and dialects and Indo-European languages are listed, and the proto-form of the word in Old Iranian and Proto-Indo-European is reconstructed. The Baxtiyari words reflect the variety spoken in Kuhrang.

The present paper aims at testing the typological criteria on the Kumzāri dialect of Larak Island, located in the southwest of the Persian Gulf. No linguistic description about the Kumzāri dialect of Larak Island has yet been carried out while it is an endangered Iranian dialect being spoken in a region adjacent to the Arabian Peninsula. Dialectal data in the paper are gathered in a team fieldwork, managed by the author in October 2008. To gather the data, 12 native speakers were interviewed, and 33 sessions were documented. The interviews were carried out on the basis of four types of questionnaires organized with different orientations. To sum up, among the phonetic-phonological features of Kumzāri, one may refer to the existence of alveo-lateral fricatives, velar retroflex approximants and nasal alveolar phonemes. Kumzāri and New Persian share similar syllabic structures. With regard to morpho-syntactic features, the head precedes both the genitive noun and modifier, and Kumzāri employs prepositions and uses demarcative and demonstrative suffixes. Non-finite verb forms are not employed in Kumzāri. There is an agreement between number and Iranian Languages and Dialects 1 7 Summary of Articles count nouns in this dialect while with regard to semantic criteria, gender distinction is absent. Moreover, the index of numbers and kinship terms in Kumzāri respectively show that numbers from 2 to 10 in Kumzāri resemble other Iranian dialects, whereas the word for number 1 does not. The kinship terms in this dialect show close similarity to those in the Lori dialect.

In Old and Middle Persian, pronominal clitics appear in Wackernagel’s position.In Rāyji, a modern northwestern Iranian language, these clitics act as A-past marker, direct and indirect object marker, object of preposition and possessor in possessive structure. As A-past markers, they float in the sentence, not appearing in Wackernagel’s position anymore. In other functions, they have moved toward head adjacent positions. This feature shows that rightward drift and head attraction have happened in Iranian languages, moving the clitics toward the right of the sentence or next to the head.

This paper proposes a technique for measuring the aggregate degree of lexical, phonological, morphological, and syntactic differences among Azari Turkish varieties. We shall thus attempt to measure the “total impact” in Weinreich’s sense, albeit with respect to four linguistic levels, lexical, phonological, morphological and syntactical. The results indicate that among all linguistic levels in West Azerbaijan, phonological level is the most sensitive aspect of Turkish compared to the other levels, esp. to social and regional differences; therefore, regarding the distinction between dialect and accent, we can say that different variations in Azari Turkish are not dialects but its sub-accents.