Pache-ye Rikhte, An Unknown Compound in Pand-e Piran

IntroductionAmong the Persian manuscripts in the British Museum, an exquisite copy is kept without the author’s name, time and place of its writing. This unique copy was corrected by Jalal Matini and an introduction was added to the book by him and then, it was published by Bonyᾱd-e Farhang-e Ῑrᾱn (Iranian Culture Foundation) in 1978. The corrector, inspired by the introduction of the text, chose the title "Pand-e Piran" (Old Men’s Advice) for this work. The book was compiled in twenty chapters, focusing on telling short and informative stories of the life of the great mystics, the men of religion and ethics in various subjects. In his comprehensive introduction, the corrector has dealt with the orthographical features and the linguistic characteristics of Pand-e Piran and some of its similarities with texts such as Muntakhab-e RuniqAlmajalis, Bostan al-Arefin and Tohfat al-Moridin and estimated the date of its composition to be about the 5th century AH according to the linguistic and textual stories. At the end of this book, there is a complete list of the words, terms, and compounds used in the text. The corrector, has used a question mark [?] for unknown or difficult words and compounds in this list to show the meaning is not clear to him with humility. This paper aimed to investigate “Pach-e-ye Rikhte” as one of these cases and sought to disambiguate its meaning using the words preserved in living dialects; it is noteworthy that Pach-e-ye Rikhte and its meaning discussed in following anecdote, have not been considered in previous studies so far.
"Malik, was known for his rigid austerity and purification of soul and he had spent many years without eating sweets or sours, warm meals, and juicy or dried fruit. Every night he went to a shop and gave a little money and took two loaves bread. This was his only meal throughout his life. Once, he got sick and when he recovered he wished to eat meat. Many patients may have such a desire. He went to the shop and gave him a penny and said: "Give me a Pache. " The chef gave him a broken Pache-ye Rikhte. The chef sent her busboy to follow him and said: "See what he will do. " After a while, the busboy turned up crying, and said: "When he left here, he brought out that Pache from the dish, and smelled it two or three times and put it in the dish again and said, " Is this enough for you? " (Pand-e Piran, 1978:17).
MethodThis is a descriptive study that was conducted via a library study, investigating a number of ancient Persian texts, referring to dialectal glossaries of Iran and field studies in Khorasan dialects. For this purpose, firstly, the terms related to the term understudy were extracted and classified from other Persian texts and dialects. Then, based on the relying on well-known phonetic changes in the Persian language, they were carefully discussed.
DiscussionThe combination of "Pache-ye Rikhte" has not been recorded in Persian dominant dictionaries or encyclopedias, such as Asadi’s Loghat-e Fars, Borhan Ghate, and Dehkhoda’s Dictionary. "Rikhte / Rikhtan" has not been defined in dictionaries in a sense appropriate to this application. However, in some texts and dialects, there is relatively much evidence based on which a combination of spoken/ dialectal forms of "Rikhtan" with "water" or alone, have been used with the meaning of separating hair from Pache, separating the birds’ feather or sheep’s wool with hot water, naked, hairless cat, smooth and slippery, a tree without leaves, and so on.
ConclusionThe use of Dari words preserved in Iranian dialects is one of the ways to eliminate the problems of the ancient Persian texts. On this basis, this study aimed to disambiguate the meaning and concept of the unknown combination of ”Pache-ye- Rikhte” in Pand-e Piran. Results of the present study showed that the “Pache-ye Rikhte” means a Pache that is cleaned by scrubbing the hair off. ”Pach-ye Rikhte”, can be semantically and verbally related in this application to some of the terms used in ancient Persian texts, or preserved in Iranian dialects, such as ”Ᾱbreit” «ÂÈÑیÊ», ”Ᾱbreit Karde” «ÂÈÑیÊ ˜ÑÏå», ”Ᾱv reit kardan” «ÂÈÑیÊ ˜ÑÏä», ”Ᾱvrei” «ÂæÑی» and ”Rit” «ÑیÊ».