Linguistic stylistics of Mashdi Galin Khanum's stories

"The Stories of MaŠdi Galin Ḫānom" is a collection of 110 Iranian folk tales written by Elwell-Sutton. These stories, with their cultural themes and special linguistic features, are an irreplaceable work among folk tales, and no independent research has been done on the linguistic stylistic features of these stories so far. The purpose of this study is to investigate the characteristics of the linguistic style of these stories at three phonetic, lexical, and syntactic levels.

The study method is descriptive and analytical. After probing the field of Persian prose, popular cultures, historical grammar and stylistic books, relevant data were extracted and categorized.

The linguistic features of the stories have made the book a valuable work in the field of stylistics. Turkish and foreign words, folk proverbs and allusions, word archaism, syntactic archaism, phonological processes, colloquial verb phrases, grammatical aberration, application of classifiers, catch phrases, indicators, lexical innovations, rhyming reduplication, initiating verbs, oaths, insults, etc. are evident in these stories. At the phonetic level, there are assimilations with the least frequency and metatheses with the highest frequency.

According to the background of the Persian language and using the old words that exist in the popular dialects of the Iranian people, it is possible to solve the problems of word formation and word selection in the Persian language to some extent. It is also possible to use their equivalents in the vernacular instead of the non-Persian words used in the language. These words can be considered as a support for Persian language and this linguistic capacity can be used. For example, instead of the Arabic words like massaneh (bladder), moattal kardan (delay), qollab (hook), Turkish qablameh (pot), French commode (chest of drawers), French bascule (big weighing machine), their Persian equivalents such as abgah, lang kardan, changak, komajdan, ganjeh, barkool, and the like can be used respectively.