نامه فرهنگستان
سال شانزدهم شماره 1 (خرداد 1396)

Yašts represent the tradition of oral poetry of Iranian herders and farmers’ community in the ancient period, which despite having Iranian national feature; they have also preserved elements of the poetic literature of their Indo-European ancestors. The praise and legendary Hymns of Yašts present poetic and symbolically the most important cultural needs of an ancient community. Panegyric style with symbolic expression of deities and heroes are two fundamental characteristics of the Yašts that cooperate with other Indo-European literary heritage. In this paper, along with showing the literary position of Yašts among in traditional poetry, it has been studied the artistic devices which have formed their poetic and literary structure. The most obvious artistic device that can be seen in Yašts, is repetition, and beside it, epithet, that usually a combination of these two devices has formed the outer structure of Yašts. The artistic devices such as simile, metaphor, metonymy and kenning, that sometimes obvious, and sometimes implicit, have completed the outer structure. Literary figures in Yašts and the advanced way to express epic and alive images show that poetry in ancient Iran had a strong background, and the poets had achieved pure experiments in poetry.

The common definition for Pazand is “rewriting of the Zand (translation and interpretation of Avesta) in Avestan alphabet”, while in Pahlavi, Persian and Arabic texts, this term is used as interpretation and exegesis of Avesta. It seems that unlike the recent and common meaning of Pazand, writing a Pahlavi word in the Avestan script is an old tradition and in some Pahlavi books e.g. Bundahišn and Denkard, we can find many learned words or proper nouns which are written in the Avestan alphabet. The subject matter of this article is the study of Pazand words in Farhang ī Oim, the oldest bilingual Iranian Lexicon. In Farhang ī Oim, there are some pazand words which can only be found in Zand and not in any other Zoroastrian Pahlavi texts. It seems that these Pazand words show the pronunciation of Pahlavi translation of the Avestan words.

One of the common phenomena in languages contact is borrowing. Khotanese, that is one of the East Middle Iranian languages, was spoken from third to the early of the eleventh century in Khotan. Whereas on the one hand, Khotan is located in Central Asia and along the Silk Road, and on the other hand, People of Khotan were Buddhist, Khotanese borrowed many words from other languages. In this paper, these loanwords and their origins are studied and they are classified according to linguistic and sociolinguistic criteria.

In the Shahnameh, there is a couplet in the Story of Siāvakhsh in which Kaykāvus praises his son’s stature with “āfarīn-e bozorgān” (The Blessings of the Great Ones). All commentators of the Shahnameh have focused their attention on the literal meaning of this compound word but in this article it is shown that “āfarīn-e bozorgān” is related to a Manichean psalm/hymn, i.e., Wuzurgān Āfrīwan and a Zoroastrian one āfrīn ī wuzurgān whose Pazand text has remained. The poet means that Kaykāvus has recited this special psalm for his son Siavakhsh.

One of the grammar categories is Participle of Necessity which is known as Gerundive, Future Participle and Future Passive Participle. The meaning of Participle of Necessity pertain to future and its concept has necessity, possibility, desire and worthiness in itself. There is Participle of Necessity structure in old and middle Iranian languages and new Iranian dialects. In Avesta, participle of necessity is made up the suffixes -iia-, -tuua- and -θβa-. In western and eastern middle Iranian languages, it is made up different suffixes in which it is seen the sign of Old Iranian suffix *-ya-. In New Persian, one kind of Participle of Necessity structure is common which it is known as worthiness adjective and made up infinitive and suffix -i/-ī.

Tense is one of the inherent inflectional features or categories of the verb. Languages vary in the number of morphological tenses they express. Many languages make a distinction between the past, present and future. But tripartite tense distinctions are not at all universal. Some languages have only two distinct tenses, such as past vs non-past (i.e., present-future), or future vs non-future (i.e., past-present). The former is the situation in many New West Iranian languages and dialects. Spoken Persian also lacks the future tense. Whereas many Central Plateau dialects only mark past and nonpast in terms of tense, fewer distinguish a future tense, and even fewer (e.g., Abyanei and Tarei) make finer tense distinctions, such as proximate (indicated by inflection of the main verb) vs distant future (expressed by periphrasis). This article studies the future constructions in the two mentioned central dialects.

Khuri is a northwestern Iranian dialect, spoken in Khur and Biyabank region in the northeast of Isfahan province.The aim of this paper is to examine the position of this dialect among the Northwestern Iranian dialects and its relationship with them, by looking at certain features of its historical phonology and some lexical features. The findings from this paper show that Khurihas basic northwestern features. But in its later sound changes, Khurishares with Balochi and Kurdish. Some innovations which have occurred in later stages of Khuri is similar to that of Balochi and other dialects such as Bašgardi in Kerman and Sistan region. Lexical and Phonological features also show some relationships with southwestern dialects.

The purpose of this paper is to prove that vowel /ɔ/ is phonetically contrastive in Katuli dialect, spoken in MohammadAbad of Ali Abad-Katul in Golestan province. The research hypothesis concentrates on existence of a back round low-mid vowel in the Katuli dialect. Five old women were interviewed each separately for one hour. They were encouraged to talk about target words so that their natural pronunciations can be recorded. At last, 100 target words containing /o/, /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ vowels were gathered. The words were segmented in Praat. The steady states of vowels were demarcated by a visual examination and minimum change of the second formant. Fundamental frequency, first and second formants were measured for steady states of vowels. Formant vowel space showed that the research hypothesis worthy to investigate. F1 variable was selected as an acoustic cue for tongue height and f2 for place of articulation and lip shape. According to normality of f1 and f2 distributions for three vowels and independence of tongue height from place of articulation and lip shape, two one-way ANOVA tests for f1 and f2 of the vowels were conducted. The tests hypothesized equality of f1 and f2 means each separately in three vowels. Statistical results showed significant differences for f1 and f2 means in three vowels at ɑ = 0.05. We concluded that a phonetic distinction among /o/, /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ can be accepted in Katuli dialect. Vowel /ɔ/ Phonemic distinction was proven too, investigating its minimal pairs and phonemic distribution.

The present study is to investigate reduplication process in Mazandarani as a collective factor although there is reduplication of non-collective factor and non-repetition collection. Reduplication in Farsi is applied to coin new vocabulary as well as such concepts as emphasis, intension, addition, continuity, congestion, and indefiniteness to add version to the base of the word. Meanwhile, it generalizes the basic meaning and changes its part of speech. Reduplication in Mazandarani is not only a collective factor bust also so generative that its interlocutor, while speaking in Farsi, applies it. The study of a set of written documentation asserts that the collective reduplication bases in Mazandarani is based on noun, adjective, and plural personal pronouns. Based on such evidence, a variety of its categories are as follows: complete reduplication, terminating complete reduplication, illformed pre-reduplication, suffix, ill-formed pre-reduplication, and adjective reduplication, noun pluralization, noun reduplication, and noun pluralization before preposition application. This process influences those words pluralized by the plural suffix “un” to make them plural again.