The Reflection of a Dialectal Feature in a Hemistich of Shahnameh: “Be aab-e dow dideh nabayad gerist”

This paper presents the reflection of a dialectal feature in a hemistich of Shahnameh. The hemistich, which reads: “Be aab-e dow dideh nabayad gerist”, appears in the tragedy of Rostam and Sohrab, the mythological father and son in Shahnameh. Most of Shahnameh researchers have not been able to offer an interpretation for the hemistich. And a few accounts, which have been offered, do not seem acceptable. The findings of this study suggest that the difficulty of this hemistich stems from the use of the Persian word be (not to be mixed with be /bi/, the English linking verb) in the sense of rare and hard-to-find. The explanation is that this morpheme is not associated with the preposition be in Modern Persian (meaning with or to), which is derived from Mid-Persian Pad. In fact, it is the dialectal variant of abē in Mid-Persian, which is an equivalent of bi or Bedune (meaning without). Thus, the figurative meaning of the phrase be aab-e dow dideh geristan (crying without tears) is “becoming helpless and despaired”. Moreover, this hemistich is taken from a local idiom, which is still used in the same sense as that used in Shahnameh. The idiom has survived in the form of two phonetic variants, namely: "be ow dida girya kadan" and “be âw dida čixrâ mukuna'' in some Grand-Khorasan Dialects. The dialectal data used in this study were collected through field research and by means of dialectal descriptions.