PERSIAN LANGUAGE AND IRANIAN DIALECTS
Year:2016 | Volume:1 | Issue:1 (1) |Papers Count:9

The future tense of the verbs has been changed from old period up to now. In Old Persian there was no future tense and often subjunctive mood has been used to refer to the future tense. In Avestan language, there has been an independent futute tense besides subjunctive mood and from this structure just remained the declarative mood and subjective adjective. In the western group of middle Iranian languages, the lack of future tense has been compensated with present subjunctive and present declarative. In the eastern group of Iranian languages, (Sogdian and Kharazmi), the future tense of the verb was made by the addition of tense suffix to the end of the verb. Following Dari Persian in the modern written language, the future tense is made through combination of the auxiliary verb »khāstan« and the lexical verb (in the full or truncated form of the infinitive). However, the mentioned future tense is not used in the spoken Persian and in practice; it has been replaced with the present declarative. In most Iranian dialects, the future tense characteristic is the same as the spoken Persian. In this paper, while investigating the historical change of the future tense of the verb from past up to now, its structure has been studied in some Iranian dialects.

This study aims at surveying and describing the process of domestication of proper names in Bisotun inscription. Domestication is among the translation strategies that the theorists like Venuti invented it to describe the common translation techniques in the context of British-American culture. Based on this approach, a translator takes a transparent and fluent style to minimize the foreign trace of the text for target language readers. In this research, domestication means examining phonological and to some extent morphological (inflectional) aspects of proper names in Elamite, Akkadian, Greek and new Persian. Proper names of Bisotun inscription as the main data were undergone domestication processes and they were examined in each of the above-mentioned languages. The results showed that each language has its specific phonological system and they differ from one another. Some languages may lack certain phonemes. Thus, they would be replaced by the most similar phonemes.

Relative clause extraposition happens whenever relative clause moves from its normal position - near the head - to the final position of the sentence. Analyzing relative clause extraposition has taken great attention since the functional grammar appeared. Due to the fact that Persian sentences remain grammatical in the case of occurrence or non-occurrence of this process, most linguists believe that this movement has a non-syntactic motivation. Having hypothesized that the occurrence of this phenomenon could have functional reasons such as the relative clause length, information structure, sameness of the verb in the main and the relative clause and the type of the verb, the extraposition process in 66 out of 150 clauses, extracted from parts of Tārix-i Bayhaqi have be examined so that the comparison of the results of this process in the narrative and literary texts with the contemporary formal texts would be possible. The results showed that from the four factors mentioned, except the information structure, the other three ones have direct impact on the relative clause extraposition. The relative clause length was the most important factor in this process in Tārix-i Bayhaqi which verifies the Howkins’ claim on the tendency of the heavy constituents in verb final languages to move to the end of the sentence and occur after the verb. Comparing these results with Rāsekhmahand et al (1391), it became clear that there is not a significant difference between the function of the relative clause extraposition in modern formal Persian and in the Tārix-i Bayhaqi.

It was an interdisciplinary research in the fields of literature and cognitive linguistics in which the interaction among the metaphor, cognition, body and culture was investigated. In this paper, some eye-based phrases of Bustan-e Sa’di have been analyzed based on cognitive linguistics approach. The data analysis showed that eye is a prototypical body organ which embodies the Persian speakers’ mind via a cultural pattern. Itconceptualizes a number of various concepts including emotions (e.g. love, desire, happiness, envy), mental faculties (e.g. knowing, understanding, thinking), cultural values (e.g. respect, hospitality), character traits (e.g. greed, cruelty), and physical states (e.g. death, pass of time). The results also showed that such conceptualization involves cognitive elements such as conceptual metaphors, image schemas and metonymy. The present study also demonstrated that in any language, when the human imagination of the body structure and the function of its organs interact with cultural patterns, the metaphor and conceptual metonymy appears.

A language is persistent when it could progress with time and could satisfy its ongoing needs. If a language does not find ways of its strengthening and durability, it will become extinct. Persian language at the beginning was an Iranian dialect. Due to several reasons, it benefitted from tremendous literary background and spread around. There are lots of ways to strengthen a language. Today certain institutions like the Academy of Language and Literature helps to spread the Persian language, but in the past each of the greatest poets had some effort in word formation and selection. Their efforts in this regard are similar to the efforts of an academy of language, and ignoring the word formation patterns of poets perhaps could lead in great damage to the language. Here, the poets’ role is to increase the grammatical capabilities of Persian language. The grammatical capabilities mean a collection of resources or capacities that a language puts at the disposal of its own users to be able to communicate more easily and with less energy along with the greatest efficiency. Nizami Ganjavi poetry was investigated in this study to determine how much he was in service of Persian language. This article aims at verifying how Nizami committed the innovations within the constraints of rhyme in his lyrics, so that not only he added to the beauty and innovation of his poems, but also had great services to Persian and other poets after him.

In this article, poems of Iranian folk literature would be introduced both from intra and extra-text perspective. Kurmanji Se-kheshties are poems with three hemistiches that date back to pre-Islamic literature, however, still they are composed and sung in the Khorāsān folk literature. In the Kurmanji language, Sekheshties are mainly sung and that’s why some bits are added to the original 3hemistiches. These bits have mostly musical function and often they are added to the Se-kheshties to adapt them to the musical Dastgāhs, however they also have semantic-affective function. After investigating 304 Se-kheshties, we examined them according to their music and their semantic-affective background. Meanwhile, we demonstratedthat how these poems could be related to the pre-Islamic literature. In the section on the literature review and appellation of this type of poem, we explained that which researches have been done on this topic up to now.

In this article, it is argued that there is a functional category Tr (Transitivity) located between Pr (Predicate) and V (Verb) which is present in all transitive sentences in the Persian language, regardless of whether they are transitive active, passive or middle. Tr may contain a probe with (object) -features and assign accusative Case. In Persian, like other languages, as Bowers (2002) claims, in contrast to Pr, Tr does not assign a theta-role in its specifier position. Hence, the functions of the traditional light verb category "v" are split between Pr and Tr in Persian, like other languages studied by bowers (2002). Empirical evidence from Persian supports this claim as those from other languages studied by Bowers (2002), such as English, Russian, Scottish Gaelic, Icelandic, Ukrainian, and German. It seems that this approach can analyze the Persian data in an appropriate way.

Etymology of the words in different Iranian dialects helps not only to better understand their phonology, but also it helps to the etymology of Persian and other Iranian languages and dialects. Iranian dialects are a rich source of linguistic data which could be used in the linguistics of Iranian languages. This paper deals with etymology of 12 archaic words from diverse Iranian dialects. For each word, after investigating the same word or its cognates in the other Iranian dialects and languages, its Old Iranian form has been reconstructed and its sound changes from Old Iranian up to Iranian dialects have been examined. The list of words examined in this paper are as follows: arde / âla »side, half«, hast / ast» house, yard«, daha»awn«, bīg / gwask »goat, calf«, gūn »udder«, jeven »grain mortar«, jəxūn »threshing-floor«, kahra »goat, kid«, kətū »dog«, mâl »cattle, quadrupeds«, tâta »uncle«, xal »bent, crooked«.

Taleshi is one of the Iranian north-western dialects which are spoken on the shore of the Caspian Sea. It has retained some of the ancient phonetic variations. In this study, after a brief description of the Taleshi verb construction, the etymology of 14 verbs of the central Taleshi dialect was investigated. Research data and their transcription were based on the pronunciation common to central Taleshi dialect. In the lexical entry of each verb, first the present and past stem of the Taleshi verbs have been inserted. Then, based on the equivalent or cognate of the word in other Iranian dialects and languages and also in other Indo-European languages, the etymology of the words has been considered and their ancient Iranian and primary Indo-European forms have been reconstructed. Then, based on the evidences from the dialect itself, the derivational structure of the words and the accomplished phonetic changes on their stems has been explained. Also, the historical evolution of Taleshi phonemes in the selected verbs of this paper has been studied from ancient Iranian up to the modern period.