نامه فرهنگستان
سال هفدهم شماره 1 (پاییز 1397)

Monāzere (literally “Debate” or “Disputation”) or So’āl-o Javāb (literally “Question and Answer”), as a genre, draws on a long-standing tradition in Persian literature. Probably the Iranians adopted this literary genre from oral literature and the Sumerian and Akkadian texts in ancient Mesopotamia. Monāzere is often in the form of a dialogue between two characters or is the account of the interaction or debate between rival animals or even objects. In mystical literature, the “Debate” is mostly between the lover and beloved, commonly followed by goftam (I said), gofti (you said), goftā (s/he said). The present paper is organized into five main sections: The oldest evidence of “Debate” in ancient Iran; Types of “Debate”; Method of “Debate”; Purpose of “Debate”; and frašna in Avestan literature. The final part contains the transcription and translation of sentences from Pahlavi edition of Dīnkard IV in relation to principles of the “Debate”.

This article attempts to explain the typological and semantic interpretation of the mythical birds by means of the comparative study in Iranian art and literature. The research is a case study that has been carried out in the frame of historical, analytical, and developmental approach. The relevant data have been collected through documentary method and fieldwork. The study explores the origin of the legendary birds throughout the course of history and examines the allegorical meaning, significance, and distinctive features of each in the semiotic systems of Iranian art and literature from the perspective of synchronic and diachronic concepts in Saussurean semiotics.

Compound names are common in Iranian naming tradition. This arose out of social tradition and beliefs of the people. In particular, this study will investigate names with two distinct and independent elements in the Old, Middle, and Modern Iranian languages. Later, the paper attempts to show that compound name tradition in Persian is not unprecedented but is a long-standing custom derived from the ancient Iranian compound naming traditions.

Amālī of Amin al-Din Haji Bola in Safīna-yi Tabrīz contains a large number of fahlavi poems. This article seeks to examine two of the fahlavi specimens in this treatise. The first fahlavi consists of three bayts (couplets) and the second one is in two bayts. The author offers a close reading of each bayt based on linguistic evidence from Iranian languages and dialects.

Mergers” and “Splits” are considerable types of phonemic change. In a number of central dialects of Iran such as the dialects of Abyāneh and Tareh, common in Barzrūd rural district in Natanz County, there is a case of phonemic split. In these dialects the short low vowel /a/ in Middle Western Iranian, has been split into unrounded low-front vowel /a/ and unrounded low-back vowel /ÿ/. The present paper examines this diachronic phonological change.

The common residence of Hawrāms and Kurds, as well as some lexical similarities between the two dialects, which arose from the extensive Kurdish borrowing of Hawrāmi throughout history, led to a misapprehension among scholars about the origin of Hawrāmi. Therefore, linguists express different views about the position of H;Qrîmi in the Iranian languages, especially its genetic relation to Kurdish. In the meantime, the distinction between language and dialect within Hawrāmi is still problematic. However, studies show that Hawrāmi, a northwestern branch of New Iranian languages, is an independent language with many dialects or accents and does not belong to Kurdish.

Abūzeydābādi, one of the central dialects of Iran, has preserved many linguistic features of Old Persian, Pahlavi, and Dar Ę. Noteworthy among them are grammatical gender, functional words, and a considerable number of inflectional and derivational prefixes. As the article suggests, providing multiple evidence would pave the way for better syntactic analysis and description of Abūzeydābādi dialect.

Competing motivations describe the interaction of general principles or motivations for the cause of language diversity. One of the approaches in analyzing competing motivations is the generalization of ordering distribution and sequence of affixes in word-formation. Interlingual studies illustrate a high degree of preference generalization for the use of suffixes in languages. This indicates that “base-suffix” positional pattern is the preferred pattern in morphological structure of languages. This paper is a typological study of the preferred “base-suffix” pattern in the morphological structure of nine Iranian languages. The evidence from this study suggests that Iranian languages, like other languages of the world, are more consistent with the “base-suffix” pattern.