Nameh Farhangestan
Year:2000 | Volume:5 | Issue:3 (15)|Papers Count:13

Hubayš ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Mo)1ammad Teflīsī (d. circa 600 A.H./1203 CB.) is a distinguished grammarian and man of science who is best known as the author of several valuable treatises dealing with medicine, pharmacology, literature and  the Holy Koran. Some of these works have been published while the rest of his works remain in manuscript form.The present paper is devoted to an unpublished MS of Hubayš entitled Taqvīm al-Adwīya al-Mufrada va al-Agzīya, which is currently preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (pocock 389). It is a work on pharmacology and lists all the different medicinal ingredients which were used at the time of the author to treat different ailments. This particular MS was copied in 876 A.H./1471 CE. in Baghdad.The treatise consists of two books: the first book deals with 730 commonly-used ingredients, while the second book describes 880 items which the author classifies as "rare and little used". In the first book the ingredients are listed in tabular format; in the first column of the table they are listed in Arabic, the second column gives their names in Persian; the third column lists them in Syriac, the fourth column in Latin, and the fifth column in Greek. In the next columns the author then passes on to a description of the ingredients' shape, medicinal properties and how they should be administered to the patient.After describing the MS and giving us  Hhbayš foreword, the paper then lists all the ingredients of the first book, in Persian and Arabic after sorting the Persian entries alphabetically, starting with Āb-e koškīde-ye afsantīn (the desiccated essence of absinthian) and ending with yalmaj = sūrenjān (meadow saffron ).

The importance of Ferdowsī's Šahnāme as the national epic of Iran has prompted many scholars throughout the ages to compile specialized glossaries and dictionaries to help the uninitiated reader navigate through the textual difficulties that he or she may encounter. Such works often list the huge cast of characters that fill the book and/ or try to explain the more difficult words or phrases that are found in the text. The author of this paper attempts to examine all these glossaries and point out their weaknesses and strengths. And he divides the glossaries into three categories: a) those that have been compiled during the previous centuries, b) those that are appended to the printed editions of the Šahnāme and c) those independent glossaries and dictionaries that have been compiled in the modern period.In the first category, the author lists nine works, some of which have not come down to us and are only mentioned in later works. The earliest glossary is entitled Mo'jam-e Šahnāme and it has been compiled by Mohammad ibn al-Rezā ibn Mohammad al-'Alavī of Tūs in the 6th century A.H./10th century C.E. Among the more important works in this category is Logat-e Šahnāme by Abdul-Qāder Bagdādī (d. 1093 A.H./1658 C.E.), in which the explanations are given in Turkish. Another notable work in this same category is Canj Nāme by 'AIi ihn Teyfūr of Bastām, which has been compiled in India, and the unique MS or the work which is kept in a literary in India, is dated 1069/1658.In the second category of appended glossaries the author does not find any notable works, but the third category of modern works is a particularly rich one. Here we find 12 titles, starting with Fritz Wolff’s Clossar (1935), which is perhaps the most notable work of scholarship on the Šahnāme in modern times. Notable also are the Vāženālmak by Abdol-Hoseyn Nūsīn (1971), and Vāže-hāye nāšenāktef dar Šahnāme by 'Alī Ravāqī (1972-74)The author concludes his paper with a wish for a new, and more comprehensive, Šahnāme  dictionary to he compiled, not by just one person but by a team or scholars under the patronage of an established cultural institution.

Arsalān Mašhadī (d. 995 AH./1587 C.E.) is a 10th-centuryA.H./ 16th-century C.E. poet who was born and bred in the city of Mashad in the province of Khorasan but spent most of his adult life in India at the court of Emperor Akbar. He specialized in composing mādde-ye tārīk.(chronograms) in which the date of some important event is embedded in a line of poetry and can be deciphered with the help of the Abjad numerical alphabet.Only a single manuscript of Arsalan's poems is known to exist, and it is in the old Majlis library in Tehran. The author has had a chance to examine this MS and gives a sampling of Arsalān's poems, which remain unpublished in their totality. The MS, illuminated and bound in leather, contains 48 folios of fine hand-made paper of Samarqand and 12 lines of poetry have been calligrapher on each page. The author suspects that the MS has been copied by the poet himself, who is also known to have been a first-class calligrapher.The author concludes his paper by appending all the chronograms that are found in the poet's divan. These are mostly about births of princes, victories in the battle-field and deaths of personages, such as the death of Mohammad Beyrām Khan, the grand vizier of Akbar in 968 A.H./1560-61 CE.

Tarzī is a poet from Orūmīye (Urmia) who flourished in the 17th century, during the Safavid period. He has been largely ignored by literary historians, and we only find him mentioned in treatises that deal with the poets of Azarbaijan. The best account of his life has been written by the late Mohammad Tamaddon. According to his biographer, Tarzī was born in the village of Tarzlū, near Orūmīye, in East Azarbaijan, to a family of Afshar tribesmen. In his early youth he went to Qazvin, and from there he travelled to Isfahan to continue his education. He lived in poverty for a long time, until finally he was introduced to the court of Shah Safī. He also attended the court of Shah 'Abbās II, who appreciated the poet's wit and humour.The most important feature of Tarzī's poetry is his boldness in manipulating the Persian language. In his poems we find hundreds of new verbs coined from nouns and adjectives, so much so that the abundance of these new coinages give a humorous touch to his poetry. For instance he takes the word Tabriz and coins tabrīzīdan, with the meaning of going to that city. Or he uses ardebīlīdan in the sense of staying in Ardebil. The author finds method in Tarzi's "madness", and classifies the way Tarzī manipulates proper nouns, common nouns and adjectives, both Persian and Arabic, to create his unusual linguistic effects. And the author hopes that we can learn a lesson or two from Tarzī in our coinages today.

The author starts his paper by recalling the flourishing state of learning in the Sassanian period and describes how scientific treatises were imported from China, India, Greece and Rome and were then translated into Pahlavi (Middle Persian), sometimes directly and sometimes via Syriac. This was especially true in the fields of medicine, astronomy and philosophy. The methods that the translators of these works used in rendering the specialized terminology of these texts into Pahlavi, the author contends, persisted until the 4th and 5th centuries A.H./10th and 11th centuries C.E. and may be seen at work in the Dari Persian writings of such Iranian luminaries as Ebn-e Sīnā (Avicenna), Bīrūnī (al-Biruni) and Nāser-kosrow. Thus, it becomes clear that many of the scientific terms that we encounter in the works of Ebn-e Sīnā  and Bīrūnī  were not in fact their own coinages, but may be traced back to Middle Persian texts. The author then sets out to prove his point. He discerns four methods that the Sassanian translators used to solve the problems of terminology1. Word-for-word rendition of foreign terms, for instance gēhān ī kōdak (in Pahlavi) coined to render the Greek mikros kosmos and gēhān ī wuzurg for makros kosmos. And he notices the same practice being used in a number of Dari Persian texts several centuries later.2. Hand-picking words from the field of everyday speech and assigning them a new and specialized meaning. For instance gōhr in Middle Persian (gowhar in Modern Persian) was selected as an equivalent for essence in philosophy. Two instances of this same practice in later centuries: afzūdan for "addition" and' kāstan for "subtraction".3. Creating compounds by joining two or more words. There are many examples of these, some of which survive even in contemporary Persian. Some examples: nēst yazad gōw in Pahlavi (for atheist), and uštur gāw palang (for giraffe). And there are many more examples of such compounds in later Persian texts.4. Adding prefixes and suffixes to the roots of words to create derivatives. Pahlavi lends itself well to this practice, and this same linguistic property is one of the stronger points of Modern Persian. Some examples: čandīh in Pahlavi/čandīh  in Modern Persian (for quantity) and čiyōn-īh in Pahlavi/čūnī in Modern Persian (for quality).

Naāser-ed-D ī n Shah is the first Iranian monarch to have visited 19th-century Europe; he traveled with his entourage overland to Russia, central Europe, and several West European countries not once, but three times: in 1873, in 1878 and finally in 1889. And he recorded his daily experiences abroad in journals, which have been subsequently published. The author examines the journals for the first and the third trip in search of Persian words and phrases that the Qajar king has used as equivalents for the unfamiliar objects and phenomena which he encountered in Europe.There were many things and practices which were totally new, but the author finds that Naāser-ed-D ī n Shah treats them in different ways: sometimes he describes them in Persian and sometimes he uses the original term, and sometimes he opts for Persian words which are no longer in common use. The author classifies these in eight categories:1. Persian, Turkish or Arabic words which have gone out of usage today, e.g. čī ālak (tūt farangī/strawberries).2. Persian, Turkish or Arabic words which have been replaced by newer words, e.g. martebe (fabaqeh/floor, storey).3. Persian, Turkish or Arabic equivalents for European terms which are different from those used today, e.g. bīmārkāne(bīmārestān/hospital).4. Persian, Turkish or Arabic equivalents for foreign terms which have not caught on and the original terms themselves are now used in modern Persian, e.g. sūrāk (tūnel/tunnel).5. Persian equivalents for foreign terms which have caught on and are widelyused today, e.g. negārkane(art gallery). 6. European terms which had no Persian equivalents In Qajar times, but do now,  estāsīon (īstgāh/station). 7. European terms which had no Persian equivalents then and are still used in their original form, e.g. sīrk (circus).8. Certain objects which were so novel that the Shah simply describes them, making no attempt to find a Persian equivalent for them, e.g. the shower in a bathroom ("then there was this pipe which had many holes in it like a rice strainer...").The author believes that the Persian equivalents of the Qajar king are not necessarily his own coinages, but reflect the way the Persian language was used in his court and among the educated people of his time.