Nameh Farhangestan
Year:2007 | Volume:9 | Issue:1 (33)|Papers Count:12

In the years leading to the Constitutional revolution, a number of reformists put forward the idea of changing the Persian script. Strangely, their justifications were very’ similar to those presented by Japanese intellectuals "in the late 19th century who argued for abandoning the Chinese script for writing Japanese. The thrust of their argument was that the Arabic script is an obstacle to literacy and the progress of science in Iran. The Constitutional revolution and the role played by the press in enlightening people showed that the problem with literacy lies not in the Arabic script but elsewhere. Likewise, although the idea of changing the Japanese script sounded like the right idea for a time, the scientific and industrial progress of the Japanese leading to a prosperous society with no illiteracy, proved the falsity of the idea nose who attributed illiteracy and social backwardness to the script, both in Japan and Iran, were obviously wrong. They were not aware of the benefits of the recent scripts and of the losses occurring as a result of the script change.

The word sahr'asub (literally city-rioter or mischief-maker) has referred to a kind of poem whose function may be understood from the literal meaning of the word itself, a poem that stirs riots in the city. Obviously, writing this kind of poem has had consequences for the poet. These poems, in spite of their literary, historical and sociological significance, have not been studied deservedly. The first such poem was written by Masud Sa'd Salman. But the genre flourished in the Safavid era, when the poets, coming in contact with India, were influenced by the social environment of India and their traditions and customs. In this paper, the writer divides sahr asub poems into three types: urban, court and guild poems, and explains each in details.

In the early days before the Constitutional revolution, the grounds were paved for humorous writing, in the modern sense of the word. After the victory of the revolution and the declaration of the freedom of the press, writing humorous pieces became very popular. Many writers began to write humorous pieces condemning the violation of the rights of the individual and the society, the ignorance of the public and the useless traditions and customs, enlightening the people in the early years of the 20th century.

In this article the writer discusses the following issues: position of rhyme in classical Persian poetry, acoustic aspects of rhyme and its effects on the line and the general atmosphere of the poem, the comparative aspects of rhyme with musical elements. The writer also presents a brief survey of the history of rhyme in Iran and the reason justifying and necessitating it by providing examples from Hafiz's sonnets.

The poet laureate Mopammad Taqi Bahar learned Arabic as an adolescent. The abundance of Arabic proverbs, poems and quotes appearing in his poetry attest to the effect of this early introduction to Arabic. In many cases, he has used Arabic proverbs or poems in a different and creative way, leaving no trace of the original. The Arabic material used by Bahar in his poetry may be divided into three types: the material that Bahar has borrowed from Arabic sources as it has not appeared in the works of other Iranian poets; the material that has appeared in the works of other Iranian poets too; the material that seems to have been borrowed from Arabic sources but are in fact quotes dating back to Iranian sources before Islam. The possibility cannot be ruled out that Bahar took this material directly from the original Pahlavi sources.

In the course of the Armenians-Iranians ancient relations, many words and names have entered the Armenian language from the Iranian languages. It is hard to talk about the effects of Old Iranian languages on Armenian due to lack of firm evidence. Hundreds of words and some affixes entered Armenian from Middle Iranian languages, especially from Parthian, many of which were accommodated into Armenian basic lexicon. In Armenian, there are hundreds of Modern Persian words and names most of which are now seen only in the realm of Armenian surnames and which are reminiscent of the effects of the Iranian culture and Persian language on Armenians and the neighboring nations.Modern Persian elements have entered Armenian both directly and indirectly via Turkish. There are about hundreds of Armenian surnames with elements of Modern Persian. The stems of these surnames are Persian words and Iranian names or a combination of them with elements of their languages (Turkish, Armenian and Arabic). There are about 60 combinations of the Turkish suffix-cl added to Persian words in the structure of Armenian surnames. The words jan, gol and Sah and to a lesser extent, the words pir, Jsaje, mir and mirza are seen in many Armenian surnames. This paper aims at presenting a very general illustration of the role of Modern Persian in Armenian surnames, the comprehensive study of which exacts a whole book.

Vazesekan-e Fars is a computer program that breaks down complex Persian words into their constituent elements and identifies their grammatical categories and semantic relations. The software has a memory consisting of simple words and morphemes and the rules governing their combination. The program, when a word is presented to it, first searches the complete form of the word in the memory and then determines its grammatical category and semantic relations. If the word does not exist in the memory, the computer breaks it down and, if the constituent elements have been combined based on the rules, presents to the user its grammatical category and semantic relations. And if the elements have not been combined based on the rules, it simply breaks it down to its constituent elements.