Nameh Farhangestan
Year:2002 | Volume:5 | Issue:4 (20)|Papers Count:15

The success of Iran's Constitutional Movement in 1906 resulted in nation-wide parliamentary elections and the creation of the country's first ever legislative chamber, which was originally called majles-e dār al-šowrā-ye melī (the National Consultative Assembly). Among the six laws ratified by this Majlis some 95 years ago, three have been singled out by the author for a close examination. These are: a) the law for the formation of provincial and city councils, b) the law for the creation of municipalities, and c) the law for the division of the country into provinces and townships and directives for local governors. The author is interested in tracing the evolution of administrative and judicial terminology in Iran, and it is the administrative terms embedded in these bills that especially catch his attention, and he lists them, from baladīyye (now šahrdārī =municipality) to nazmīyye (subsequently replaced by šahrbānī = the police). The author also examines these texts for their stylistic characteristics, and finds the language considerably more precise than the fuzzy language used by government scribes in the decades preceding the Constitutional Movement. The author also finds some foreign loan-words in these texts, which he thinks indicate those early legislators may well have had an eye on European models.

The modern editions of the divan of the famous fifth/eleventh-century poet Manūčehrī of Dāmgān have all been edited by Dr. Mohammad Dabīr-Sīyāqī, a well-known scholar of the "old school". The first printing of the divan was undertaken way back in 1326/1947 by Zavvār Publishers of Tehran, and after three reprints, a second edition was brought out by the same editor and publisher in 1370/1991. The author starts his paper by citing a dozen or so unpublished distiches by the poet that he has found in anthologies and other sources that he says are not included in the published edition of the divan, but the bulk of his paper is devoted to his critical observations of Dr. Dabīr-Sīyāqī's working methods as a text editor. The author particularly objects to the editor's inclusion in the text Allāme Dehkodā's marginal notes on an MS of Manūčehrī that was in his possession and the observations of the editor's mentor, the late professor Forūzanfār, after the latter's perusal of the page-proofs of the first edition. The author believes that such scholarly conjectures should have been printed at best as marginal notes, as they are only conjectures and not based on textual evidence.

The subject of this paper is the linguistic relations between Old/Middle Iranian and Old/Middle Indian languages, especially those which resulted in borrowings. The languages under discussion include: Sanskrit, Pali, Gandhari (of the Indian family), Old Persian, Avestan, Sogdian, Bactrian, Choresmian, Middle Persian and Parthian (of the Iranian family).

In original Sogdian texts, and in texts which were translated into Sogdian from Buddhist, Manichaean or Christian sources, one comes across a wide range of titles and honorifics that were used to indicate the place of the person in question in the social hierarchy. And in this group of titles, there is a whole category of honorifics for aristocratic ladies. The author sets out to explore this particular category, which she says is an indication of the high status that ladies of rank enjoyed in Sogdian society.

This paper deals with six negative prefixes that are found in contemporary Persian. Ranked according to their frequency of usage as determined by the author in her perusal of modern Persian sources, these are:1)غیر /geyr/ (= non-, un-). It is a prefix of Arabic origin which is used almost synonymously with the negative prefix -نا, but _نا is considered the stronger of the two, for instance غیر ممکن- and نا ممکن (both =impossible). In current Persian usage, غیر- is used where "non-" is used in English, e.g. غیر ایرانیان-(=non -Iranians). غیر- also combines with قابل/qābeI/ to create the compound negative prefixغیر قابل- (= un---able), such as غیر قابل -(= unusable).2) بی /bī/ (= without, -less). It combines with nouns to create adjectives or adverbs, such as بی شعور (= stupid) and بی درنگ.(= immediately).3) ضد/zed(d)/ (= anti-, counter-). It was originally an adjective of Arabic origin with the meaning of "working against" or "hostile to". As a prefix, it combines with nouns to create adjectives, such as ضد آب (= waterproof) or ضد افسردگی (= antidepressant).4) -نا and -نه /nā-, na-/ (= un-, in-, im-, il-, ir-). _نا and -نه are the most versatile and potent negative prefixes used in the language today. They combine with adjectives to create adjectives of opposite meaning, e.g. ناراحت (=uncomfortable) or حق شناس (= ungrateful). It is interesting to note that in such cases -نا is placed on the second element of the compound adjective.5)-لا /la-/ (= -less, un-). This negative prefix of Arabic origin is not used much these days to create new words, but it is found in a number of common words such as لاعلاج (= incurable).6) پاد/pād/ (= anti-). It is found only in a few old words and in some new coinages. It is combined with nouns to create a word of opposite meaning, e.g.پادتن /pādtan/ (= antibody).

Maulānā Obeydollāh Abīdī was a poet and scholar of Iranian descent (d.1306 A.H./1888 C.E.) who lived in Bengal during the British Raj, and had acquired a good working knowledge of several languages, including Persian, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Arabic and English. He is the author of many works, some in prose and some in verse, most of which remain unpublished. These include his divan, an autobiography and several volumes of textbooks for teaching Persian to students. Abīdī is also the author of a five-volume set of Persian grammar entitled dastūr-e pārsī āmūz (the Grammar-Book for Teaching Persian). Three volumes of this set were printed and published in India towards the end of the nineteenth century. In this paper, the author who has examined the second volume of the series reports on it. Abīdī may be considered a pioneer grammarian, and so most of his terminology is of his own coinage. The seven parts of speech that Abīdīenumerates are 1) esm (noun), 2) nāyeb-e esm (pronoun), 3) fe'l (verb), 4) vasf-ol-fe'l (modifying adverb) 5) rābef-e kalāmī (preposition), 6) rābet-e jomaī (conjunction) and 7) asvāt (interjections).

The paper highlights the life and works of a versatile man of letters of the Qajar period, called Mirzā Es.hāq Šams-ol-Mā'alī, originally of Neyrīz, in Fārs province, who was an excellent calligrapher, a bilingual poet (Persian and Arabic), a master of mathematics and astronomy and an expert in Islamic lore, and yet he remains relatively unknown, most of his writings unpublished. He was born in the town of Neyrīz early in the 13th century A.H./late in the 18th century, in a family of celebrated calligraphers, He spent his childhood in his native town and then moved to Shiraz to continue his education. As he began to compose poetry, he chose "Šams-ol-Mā'alī" as his nom de plume, and even though he used a different pen-name, "anjoman", later in life, his original pen-name stayed with him and became his title.Šams left Shiraz in mid 13th century for a pilgrimage to the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashad. He had a long stopover in Isfahan, where he was introduced to the Governor, Manučehr Khan Gorjī, Mo'tamed-od-Dowleh, and where he met some other literary figures. After his return from Mashad he stayed in Tehran for a while, where he was likewise introduced to the court of Motlammad Shah. Later he returned to Shiraz and for several years was a companion of Prince Tahmāsb Mirza, Mo'ayyed-od-Dowleh, while he was the Governor of Fars province. Some of Sams's best poems have been written, in Persian and Arabic,in praise of this prince.Towards the end of his life, Šams fell into bad times, and we find him complaining of his destitution in a letter that he has written to a would-be benefactor. He died possibly in Šuštar, sometime after 1280/1863 according to one account, and possibly in Tehran around the same date, according to another.His surviving works, all of them in manuscript form, are preserved in the Central Library of Tehran University; these include his poetry, mostly panegyrics, a treatise on astronomy, his literary writings and letters, a work entitled Šīrāzīyyeh in three books, which is a collection Koranic quotations interspersed with his own poetry.

The study in question was conducted in the three cities of Ābādān, Ahwāz and Masjed-e Soleymān in 1994. All three localities have long been associated with Iran's oil industry, and the purpose of the study was to find out what foreign words have found their way into the speech of the common people as a result of this century-long association. The country's oil resources were first tapped by a British company (AlOC which has evolved into BP now), and as a result most of these loan-words are of English origin.The author, who conducted this study herself, gives a preliminary report of her findings in this article. The main feature is a list of some 180 words, arranged alphabetically from اف/āf (= off-duty) to هیتر/hīter/(=heater).A dozen or so of these words are so widely used that they have formed compounds, such as بوک کردن /būk  kardan/ (= to book, to make a reservation).The author stops short of a full linguistic or sociological analysis, but says there is ample evidence of morphological distortion and some evidence of semantic shift.

The starting point of this copious paper is an earlier paper by the eminent British archaeologist, Professor David H. Bivar, entitled "A Persian Fairyland" (1985), in which he suggests that in ancient Persia fairies (parī,parīyān in plural) were members of a tribe of warriors endowed with magical powers, who were collectively known as parīkānī, and who lived in the Bārez mountains south of Kerman, in a region extending from Rafsanjān to Pārīz.The author then undertakes an exhaustive search in ancient sources to find references to the parīkānī and/or its variant forms. He is led to various parts of Iran but eventually he finds evidence to suggest that a branch of this tribe resided in a part of the Median kingdom, near present-day Qazvin, in the Alamut valley in the folds of the Alborz mountain range. It is a gross injustice to the author of this paper to summarize his thesis and his findings in one paragraph, so the readers are requested to take the trouble of perusing Malekzādeh's text in the original.