نامه فرهنگستان
سال سیزدهم شماره 2 (زمستان 1392)

Numerals in Khotanese have been the subject of various studies. The present article is a short overview of their content, including the construction of ordinal, distributive, approximative and composite numbers. Special attention is paid to the case of repetition in numbers and its use in this particular language as compared to Sanskrit and Avestan. Reference is also made to the new etymological suggestions on some numerals.

A new manuscript of Vendidād has come to light in the manuscript collection of Hosseini family’s private library in Mašhad. It is a fine manuscript, handsomely written, complete, with some signs of wear and patches. It is written in two hands, within a period of five months. The first copyist, Šahmardān, the son of Bahrām, the son of Marzbān, the son of Fridun, the son of Bahrām, the son of Rostam, the son of Bondār, the son of Šahmardān, the son of Dinyār, finished his portion of the manuscript, copied from his father’s and his uncle Fridun’s copy on the day Goš of the month of Amordād A.Y. 1025 (1656 A.D.). The second copyist,Fridun, the son of Gobadšā, the son of Rostam, the son of Fridun, the son of Gobadšā, the son of Rostam, the son of Bondār, the son of Šahmardān, the son of Dinyār, a cousin of the first copyist, completed the manuscript on the day Āzar of the month Āzar of the same year. The manuscript contains a third signature by a certain Jāmāsp, the son of Hakim, the son of Ardašir who claims that he copied this same manuscript from the copy of Fridun, the son of Gobadšā. Accordingly, the present manuscript of Vendidād belongs to the Marzbān line of Avestan manuscripts. A close examination of this copy may, somehow, lead the scholars of Avestan studies to the original copy of Vendidād.

The word ĵahiš (ĵahišn in Middle Persian), frequent in the Middle and New Persian vocabulary, in addition to its ordinary meaning ‘jumping’, it also means ‘fortune’. Its etymology has been the subject of a number of scholarly articles. Nevertheless, no satisfactory proposition has, so far, been advanced. The present article critically overviews the existing literature and introduces yat- “to stand” as the Old Iranian root from which ĵahiš and its cognates are derived and, in the course of their semantic development, have acquired diverse meanings.

Fahlawiyyāt (sing. fahlawī) are eleven-syllable quatrains in the oral poetry of Western Iranian Languages. Linguistically, they are divided into two groups of old (i.e. composed in a dead language) and new (i.e. composed in a living language), and, prosodically, into two groups of quantitative and non-quantitative metres. Accordingly, fahlawiyyāt may be classified in a fourfold schema: 1) old non-quantitative, 2) old quantitative, 3) new quantitative, and 4) new non-quantitative or regional. It is possible to reconstruct the original characteristics of the old non-quantitative fahlawiyyāt on the basis of metrical features of new non-quantitative examples, which may lead us to conclude that the old non-quantitative fahlawiyyāt must have had a three-beat (or three-ictus) accentual metre with eleven syllables.

Alongside its political and social significance, Isfahan was a centre of learning throughout the medieval history of Persia. In the earlier Islamic centuries, it was a canon of Arabic learning and attracted scholars from throughout the lands of Eastern Caliphate. When Avicenna came to settle in Isfahan, he soon realized that his knowledge of Arabic required much improvement, notwithstanding the fact that he had already compiled his famous Canon of Medicine in Arabic. Persian is also deeply rooted in Isfahan for centuries, ever since it gained the status of lingua franca throughout the Persianate world. Isfahan was one of the first among Persian towns to adopt New Persian as the literary language. The mass migrations from Transoxiana and Khorasan into central and western Persia, triggered by the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century, further reinforced the position of Persian in Isfahan, so much so that the city became a canon of Persian literature and a stage from which Persian began to diffuse into other towns of Persia. In our time Isfahan is one of the purest towns in the nation in terms of language: save for the small Armenian community, Persian is virtually the only idiom of communication among the inhabitants, whose Persian accent is generally perceived as a provincial variety par excellence. Notwithstanding all these, the spoken vernacular of Isfahan was not Persian but a variety of what is known today as Central Dialects, i.e. the idioms still spoken in central Iranian Plateau in dozens of villages, including those in Isfahan district. These dialects can be characterized on geographical and linguistic grounds as Median, within the Northwest Iranian family of languages, contrasting with Persian which belongs to the Perside or Southwest group. Some Median documents from Isfahan are available from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries. By the nineteenth century, Median had survived only among the Jewish community of the town as well as in some remote villages. Therefore, the language shift among the bulk of city dwellers must have occurred between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. This paper attempts to establish how and when the language shift took place by examining both the historical and contemporary linguistic data.

Taleshi is a member of Northwest Iranian Languages. It is spoken in some parts of Guilan Province of Iran and in the Northeastern region of the Republic of Azarbaijan. The corpus for the present study is gathered from the residences of Tāskuh, a village located in ten kilometer distance from the town of Māsāl. Taleshi has a rich system of inflection including different types of case markers. It follows the accusative case system in the present tense and double oblique case system in the past tense. The inability of double oblique case system to distinguish different grammatical relations of transitive verbs paves the way for grammaticalization of word order in the past tense. This cannot be taken as an indication of the disappearance of case markers, whereas they are quite functional in the accusative system of present tense. There is also a class of case markers that, along with their governing postpositions, assume other grammatical and semantic functions. As one of the main sources of morphological case markers, postpositions, with their mere availability and a wide range of functions, guarantee the continued use of morphological/syntactic case markers. In fact, even at the present state of this variety, two instances of change from postpositions to case markers are detected.

The present article is a comparative study of formal and semantic properties of reduplication in Sorani Kurdish and Persian with the aid of Moravcsik’s scheme (1978). Formally, morphological and phonetic properties of reduplicative constructs are investigated. As for the semantic properties, the study is focused on the concepts that enjoy high frequency in reduplication. The survey concludes that in the case of morphological properties, reduplicative construction is the same in both languages. Phonetically, there are some differences, and in the case of semantic properties augmentation is frequent in both languages.

The few studies dealt with passive in Kalhori Kurdish so far, treated only the morphological type. It is possible to identify, with the application of Keenan and Dryer scheme (1985), other types of passive such as basic passive and passive of intransitive verbs. According to the available data, there is no non-basic passive in this particular dialect. In simple verbs, the agreement marker of tense, person and passive is normally on the verb. But in the case of compound verbs there are two alternatives: in simple and progressive present, the agreement marker is on the verb, and in simple and progressive past as well as present perfect, the passive morphology is on the verbal element and the agreement marker is on the nominal element.