The Folklore and Informal Spoken and Written Elements at the Lexical Level of Some Translations of the Old Testament

One of the unknown types of Persian language and literature are translations of the Old Testament. Usually, the language of these texts is Persian and their script is Hebrew. One of the characteristics of this type of texts is the strong influence of Persian literature and vernacular language. In this article, based on sociolinguistics criteria, the spoken and written elements of some of these texts (translations of the Old Testament) have been examined. According to this study, the language of the aforementioned texts has been affected by the vernacular language in two aspects: first, phonetic transformations, which include the following: transformation of âm / ân > um / un, phonetic homogeneity, phonetic reduction, phonetic increase, different types of mutation and metathesis inversion. Second are dialectal words. The dialectal elements of any language have a close relationship with its vernacular language and literature. Informal written elements have also influenced these texts in two aspects: a. use of Hebrew script, b. spelling mistakes based on the present research. It can be concluded that this type of translation of the Old Testament is linguistically closer to the vernacular or at least informal type of language.