Suchergebnisse

The word-final /-a/ and the diphthong /ay/ of earlier New Persian shift respectively to /-e/ and /ey/ in modern Persian. Isfahani Persian follows suit, e.g. dande "rib" and meydun "plaza." However, the earlier phonemes survive only in a finite set of words: Arabic loanwords in which the /a/ succeeds pharyngeal consonants, e.g. ǰomʾa (< ǰumʿa) "Friday," fâtaː (< fātiḥa) "funeral," ayd (< ʿayd) "feast." Isfahani Persian shows other vocalic anomalies adjacent to original pharyngeals, including syllable-final iʿ > aː in qânaː (< qāniʿ) "content," maːmâr (< miʿmār) "architect." This article investigates these phonological irregularities and their geographic distribution and historical periodization.

This study concerns the native language of Shirazi Jews, most of whom live in diasporic communities outside Iran. The language Judeo-Shirazi belongs to the Southwest Iranian group, as do most other native languages spoken in southern Iran. As such, Judeo-Shirazi shows general agreements with native rural varieties spoken in inland Fārs. There are, however, phonological features suggesting that Judeo-Shirazi is an insular survivor of the Medieval Shirazi language, from which a sizable literature has survived dating back to the fifteenth century.

Located in the Caspian forest south of the capital city of Sāri in Mazandaran, the rural district of Kalijān Rostāq is home to a number of close-knit villages which share a local Mazandarani dialect. The vernacular offers some authentic features in phonology, morphology, and lexis that are otherwise lost in the urban variety spoken in Sāri due to contact with Persian. In an attempt to elucidate on the loosely-known aspects of the Mazandarani language, this study offers a sketch grammar of the dialect of Kalijān Rostāq with a view to typological features. The glossary that follows includes many Caspian cultural items that are already moribund in the language.

AbstractThis article presents the grammar of Jowshaqani, a Central Iranian dialect. Like other members of this group, Jowshaqani has its own peculiarities; for instance, it has a rich inventory of personal pronouns distinguished by gender in the 3rd person singular, as do verb endings: nen ate "he comes", néna atea "she comes", etc. The past tenses of transitive verbs are inflected ergatively, with the agential affixes, which float through the sentence yielding complex syntactic structures.

AbstractThis paper studies the Tabari verbs bāutεn 'to say', baitεn 'to seize', hākεrdεn 'to do', and daptuniεn 'to throw'. It proposes that the past stem of 'say' is derived from the Old Iranian *gaub- rather than the commonly assumed root *wač-. It postulates also that the nasal element in the present stem kεn- 'do' is not exclusively due to the integration of the old participial formant *-ant-, but also because the stem is an offspring of a nasalised Old Iranian present stem, as is the case with Persian kun-. The verb 'throw', largely extinct but appearing in various forms in the 19th-century documentations, is subjected to a comparative analysis against some other Iranian languages.

This article transcribes and glosses a nineteenth-century Mazandarani document on Babi-state conflict at Shaikh Tabarsi. Collected in 1860 in the town of Barfurush, it was published five years later by Boris Andreevich Dorn in Perso-Arabic characters. The text is the first known prose document based on natural speech in the modern Mazandarani language. The language of the text is fundamentally the same as that spoken today in the Persian province of Mazandaran, located south of the Caspian Sea. As one expects, however, there are certain extinct traits in the text, which could be identified only by comparison with other surviving Mazandarani documents of the same period. The text will contribute to the study of the largely understudied language of Mazandaran, particularly to its development since the composition of the text. It may also serve as a supplementary historical document for the historic incident it narrates.

AbstractThe paper studies and summarises the linguistic materials on Tabari found in I. N. Berezin's "Recherches sur les dialectes persans". This book was the first attempt in Iranian dialectology, but due to the inaccuracies and incoherent transcription it has largely been ignored since its publication in 1953. Tabari, one of the Iranian languages studied in the book, has more than three million speakers in the Persian province of Mazandaran on the southern shores of the Caspian Sea. It sheds light on certain grammatical characteristics of Tabari not so clearly stated in other contemporaneous sources. From materials documented by Berezin, 24 sentences and a glossary (including a separate list of verbs) are extracted and listed in the article.

AbstractJuhuri is a dialect of the Tat language of the eastern Caucasus (specifically, Dagestan and Azerbaijan). Although Juhuri is dialectologically related to Persian, it is not mutually intelligible with any Persian dialect. The Juhuri speakers, called Mountain Jews, are estimated at around 200,000, most of whom have immigrated to Israel and the United States. The New York community is largely centered in Brooklyn around the Kavkazi Jewish Congregation. The language is still spoken by those born in the Caucasus, and is maintained in some families and some spheres of daily life. Many of these Mountain Jews are multilingual in Juhuri, Russian, Azerbaijani, Hebrew, and English. In this article, we situate the language within the context of the New York expatriate community and explore the role of Juhuri in relation to ethno-religious identity, language attitude, and functional domains. The data reported on here are based on interviews and a written survey. We conclude that although the odds are heavily stacked against the survival of Juhuri, there may be a critical mass of language activists who can turn the tide. The fate of the language in the twenty-first century will likely be decided in the next two decades.

This article includes part of the linguistic material we documented in 2002 from a galesh ranch in central-eastern Mazandaran. It transcribes, translates, and glosses two texts related by a patriarch on his long, eventful life: the dramatic elopement with the girl he married, his successful family life and career as a pastoral nomad, and his long resistance against the laws forcing the galesh families to evacuate the forest for good. Notwithstanding our dialectological purpose, namely documentation of the largely understudied language of Mazandaran within the long-standing tradition of Iranian philology, the article may also provide raw material for the anthropologist, sociologist, and historian, as it relays an unrecorded tradition just before its total disappearance.

AbstractThe texts published here are in an eastern Mazandarani dialect spoken in the Caspian littoral in northern Iran. The informant is a rural woman who recollects the supernatural deeds of her father-in-law, revered like a saint after his death. The stories are narrated in a most intimate manner, something rarely published previously in Iranian dialect documentations. The folkloric songs typify those sung in Caspian rice paddies by women, who traditionally have a dominant role in the rural economy. The stories and songs provide both linguistic and ethnographic data for this poorly studied but important province with its unique culture among the Iranian-speaking groups in Iran.