Nameh Farhangestan
Year:2003 | Volume:6 | Issue:1 (21)|Papers Count:18

The Holy Qur'ān plays a central role in the life of all Moslems. This is equally true of the Iranians. To show one aspect of this influence, the author has gone through the Holy Book to pick and list those words and phrases that have found their way into the Persian colloquialisms, and since he is himself originally from Tehran, he has drawn these instances from the everyday speech of his fellow citizens. As Mr. Habībī left the Iranian capital in the early 1960's for a long period of residence in Europe, where he was an active member of the then Iranian opposition, he has placed a time frame on his findings. Also he has made a special point of excluding from his list those words and expressions that may be categorized as "literary". With the inclusion of this latter group the list would have been much longer. The list is sorted alphabetically and starts with الله اکبر (God is greatest) and ends with ید بیضا (the miraculous shining white hand of Moses). Each word in the list is accompanied by several colloquial citations and the Qur'anic verse where the word has been originally used.

Lā'eq  Šir-Ali was Tajikistan's foremost contemporary poet, and his death, in 2000, was deeply mourned by lovers of poetry in his country and in other Persian-speaking lands. In this copious paper, the author sets out to examine Lā'eq's poetical career, highlight his favorite themes, and quote here and there some telling passages of his poetry. In the author's view, Lā'eq was a lyrical poet in the traditional sense of the word who remained within the boundaries of classical Persian poetry in spite of his innovations and his innovative style.

The author starts his paper with the assertion that literary language owes a part of its "literariness" to defamiliarization of speech, or in other words, to transforming everyday speech into something unconventional and novel. He then passes on to describe some of the unconventional ways that classical Persian poets have used pronouns in their work. Among these, is the omission of the pronoun's antecedent, which is not normally permissible in ordinary speech. Another practice is to use a personal pronoun (من وتو،...)where the meaning goes far beyond one person and an impersonal pronoun (e.g. انسان) should have been used. Or the second person singular pronoun تو which is used variously to refer to God or to one's earthly beloved or to a whole range of persons.Such unconventionality in the use of pronouns, the author states, allows the poet to substitute one pronominal form for another without inflicting any damage on the form or sense of the language. And this is something that can only be done in poetry.

What is an image schema? It is a relatively novel linguistic concept that suggests that we draw on our everyday experiences to form visual models which are then verbalized to help us express ourselves. The author, who is a distinguished linguist himself, sets out in this paper to acquaint his readers with this concept as put forward by a group of linguists called cognitive semanticists. So, he first discusses the views of this group of linguists, and then deals at length with image schema by defining it and enumerating its major types (such as containment schema, path schema, force schema, etc), while citing numerous examples in Persian and English. He concludes his paper with an evaluation of the concept.

This paper deals with a special type of object in Persian that the author claims has been neglected by grammarians. It occurs only when we have a compound verb such as اجازه دادن (= to give permission) in the sentence, and then another noun is linked to the noun in the compound verb by the ezāfeh mechanism, for instance اجازه تحصیل (= permission to get educated). The sentence that the author gives us as his benchmark is the following: او به دخترش اجازه تحصیل داد (=He gave his daughter permission to further her education). This author points out that this key sentence could be rephrased a او به دخترش اجازه داد که تحصیل کندwhere the second object of the verb اجازه دادن takes the form of a subordinate clause. And thus we find out that تحصیل in the model sentence is مفعول نشانه اضافه ای (= the object with a genitive-case marker).The author then goes on to investigate the frequency of this syntactic structure in classical Persian prose and poetry and also in the everyday speech of Iranians. He also provides guidelines for distinguishing this type of object from the two other and more commonly used types of objects, namely the direct and indirect objects.

This paper is based on a study of Iranian TV commercials that the author has recently undertaken. At the start, she quotes a number of Western linguists on the role that language plays in composing commercial messages, to provide a theoretical foundation for her discourse. She then analyses the crop of recent commercials to determine which linguistic techniques are more commonly used by the Iranian copywriters, and advertisers. A very common technique, she finds, is the transposition of the keyword to the beginning of the sentence, in place of the natural subject, for emphasis. Another technique is a very generous use of positive and persuasive adjectives in the context of a flowery language. Likewise, a growing genre is the singing commercial that draws on rhythmic language and music to drive its message home, and this is not surprising for Iran, considering the time-honoured poetical traditions of the country.The author concludes by stating that in today's fast-changing world, the linguistic techniques used in advertising are also rapidly changing and evolving."In this development, the enduring factor is the important role of language in advertising. The potentials of the language continue to provide the advertiser with a powerful tool to exploit."

This is a review of a prize-winning novel, entitled in Persian چراغها را من خاموش می کنم  by Zoyā Pīrzād. It is the writer's fourth published work and her first novel. The reviewer, Ms. Ojākīlyāns, starts by giving us a detailed synopsis of the story, which is outwardly very uneventful. The whole novel is centred on the everyday life of a middle-class Armenian family, the Āyvāzīyāns, in the southern oil city of Abadan, in the 1960s. The story starts with the arrival of another Armenian family, the Sīmonīyāns, in the neighbourhood, and ends with their rather sudden departure a year or so later. In between, the two families find common ground to mix and to react to one another. The main character is Kelārīs Āyvāzīyān, a 38-year old housewife and mother, whose sole occupation is keeping house and seeing to the day-to-day needs of an indifferent husband, Ārtūš, (a senior oil company employee), and her three growing children, a boy of 15, and a pair of girl twins, aged 11. She is, the one who turns off the lights at night after every one has gone to bed. Her routine is undermined when their new neighbour, Emlī Sīmonīyān, a young divorcé, pays a little too much attention to her and awakens tender feelings in her. And as a result she begins to question the validity of her role as a house-maker, which does not leave her time for the pursuit of her own personal interests.Ms. Ojākīlyāns looks at the novel from every angle and finds it on the whole "fascinating and especially successful in portraying the inner maze of a woman's mind".

The Persian novel Bāmdād-e Komār (The Morning after a Night of Carousal) by Ms. Fattāneh Hāj-Seyyed-Javādī (Parvīn) became a runaway best-seller when it was first published in 1994, and has gone through many printings ever since. The story, set in post-Qajar Tehran, centres on Mahbūbeh, a young girl from an aristocratic family, who falls in love with, and marries Rahīm,a young carpenter, and has a very turbulent life. Most of the reviews of Bāmdād-e Komār that appeared in the press at the time were negative, and yet they had little effect in denting the popularity of the book. The review of the novel by Ms. Ojākīyāns, which has been written for inclusion in an encyclopedia of Irano-Islamic literature, has been selected by the editor as a model of fairness and at the same time thoroughness.The review includes a lengthy synopsis of the story and an analysis of the characters, and an evaluation of the writer's technique. And the reviewer's verdict: "On the whole, the book may be said to have a number of positive and attractive elements."

The author of this paper has set herself the task of following the long journey of the Sumerian word abzu to Transoxiana, where it becomes xxwzyy, with the meaning of "pond, lake", and from there finds its way into many Iranian languages and dialects. The author patiently traces the word's progress, and in each instance gives examples that she has found in ancient texts. According to the author, ābzan in modern Persian, and even possibly howz, are descendants of that word from Transoxiana.

This is a very technical paper in which the author traces the journey of a Sogdian word to Iran, through many ancient texts and Iranian dialects, to link it to the Modem Persian words āyīn (ceremony) and āyine (mirror). The Sogdian word in question is (Ə)ß∂ēnē which means, according to experts the author quotes "custom" and "accustomed". As the original word and its Persian offspring are quite different morphologically, the author has to resort to many rules of linguistic metamorphosis to prove her case. And these arguments simply do not lend themselves to summarizing.

In Iranian mythology, Tahmures is the 3rd ever king of the land (after Kīyūmars and Hūšang) and he is said to have domesticated some animals, and taken certain steps towards civilized living by teaching his subjects to weave cloth and make garments for themselves. During his reign of thirty years, he fought and subjugated the dīvs (a race of crafty creatures who lived south of the Caspian Sea), and they, in exchange for their life being spared, taught Tahmurs their alphabet and reading and writing skills. It was thus that Tahmures became known as dīvband (the captor of dīvs, especially in the Šāhnāme). But Tahmūrs is also known by some other honorific titles, such as dībāvand and zībāvand, and notably zībāvand, which is mentioned in the Avestā, meaning "fully armed", and is favoured by such eminent Iranologists as the late Arthur Christensen over other titles.In his copious paper, the author embarks on an exhaustive examination of these variant titles in Iranian, Islamic and Western sources in order to find out which would be the most apt. He is keen on the idea that Tahmūrs is credited with having discovered how to produce silk by breeding silkworms, and also with having initiated the craft of weaving fine silken cloth, the dībā, which was also used as a surface for writing. And he concludes, among other things, that ībāvand would be a more appropriate title for King Jamšīd, Tahmūrs's successor, who paid a great deal more attention to weaponry.