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Two Dialects Spoken in the Central Persian Desert

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2011

W. Ivanow
W. Ivanow
Affiliation:
Calcutta.
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Extract

In 1896 A. Querry published in the Mémoires de la Société de linguistique de Paris (vol. ix, pp. 110–24), a short note on the dialect spoken in Nain. His materials were collected by some of his Persian friends at Tehran where they chanced to meet a Naini on his visit to the capital. Since that time nothing has appeared in the press to add to our information concerning the linguistics in that corner of Persia.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 58 , Issue 3 , July 1926 , pp. 405 - 431
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1926

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References

page 405 note 1 Nā’in, locally called Nóin, is a small but ancient town, some 90 miles east of Isfahan. Now commercial importance belongs to its suburb, Muḥammadiyya (also an old place, mentioned already in the fourteenth century), which actually lies at the crossing of the roads Isfahan–Khorasan and Tehran–Kerman. There are apparently no means to ascertain if this dialect was spoken there in Middle Ages.

page 406 note 1 Grundriss der Iranischen Philologie, vol. i, part ii, pp. 381–406.Google Scholar

page 406 note 2 Materials for the study of Persian dialects (in Russian), St. Petersburg, 1888Google Scholar ; W. Geiger has substantially perused it in his article in the Grundriss.

page 406 note 3 Here the terminology of Mann, O. is followed, as explained by him in the introduction to his Kurdisch-Persische Forschungen, 1909, part i, “ Die Tajik Mundarten der Provinz Fars.”Google Scholar W. Geiger splits these dialects into two families : one the “ Caspian ” group, and the other the “ Central ” group.

page 407 note 4 Anārak, is locally called Norúsune ; it is a small town of no commercial importance—even as a local market. The valley between it and Nain is about 15 farsakhs broad, entirely waterless and arid. The communications with the former are rather frequent, because it is the nearest important town to Anārak. Many Anarakis are living in Nain, others go to Yazd, Isfahan, and as far as Sabzawar and Mashhad, rapidly forgetting their original dialect.

page 408 note 1 Several specimens of rustic poetry, collected in Pusht-i-Bādām in the winter of 1914, were published by me with a Russian translation in vol. xxiii of the Zapiski of the Russian Archæological Society, 1915, pp. 45–6 (Nos. 17–22). They are purely Khorasani songs.

page 408 note 2 This village resembles an ant-hill, is surrounded by a wall, and possesses a highly interesting structure, a minaret of purely Sunnite type, in its architecture resembling the style of the buildings which one sees in Bukhara, or generally in Turkestan.

page 409 note 1 The district is very thinly populated, although the town of Tabbas is very old, and probably attracted settlers from other parts of Khorasan. To the south, along the Tabbas-Nayband range, there are only few very small hamlets. In Nayband “ bazari ” with traces of Sistani influence is spoken. The villages on the eastern slopes of the Tabbas range, as in Duhuk, Arishk, Bushruya, and minor hamlets, speak a sort of Qaini. To the north of Tabbas there is no population until one arrives at the districts of Turshiz or Sabzawar, where the same Khorasani is in use.

page 409 note 2 These two villages not only in the language, but also in the dress of the inhabitants, architecture of their houses, etc., differ from the Khorasani type and from some other villages in the district of Tabbas that I have seen. Most probably they are comparatively new settlers from the West.

page 409 note 3 The district of Astrabad so many times changed its population that nothing except the “ bazari ” and Turkmani Turkish is spoken there. The districts of Bistam and Shahrud are in the same position. I tried on the spot and from many Shahrudis living at Sabzawar to find whether anything has remained from the ancient local idiom of Bistam, but my search was in vain.

page 409 note 4 In the province of Kerman, which is very thinly populated, peculiar patois are spoken not only in different villages, but also by numerous nomads and half-nomads, who are emigrants from Khorasan, and are probably of Jamshidi or Timuri origin. It seems as if the speakers of sub-dialects which are akin to Khorasani are in majority.

page 413 note 1 Perhaps really suht, not sut.

page 415 note 1 The existence of this form in dialects seems to be doubtful, usually it is extremely difficult to make it understood and it is invariably taken by peasants for the third person plural of the Preterite. In practice whenever I tried to get the form out through indirect ways, asking for the equivalents of the forms on -ani (like guftani, kardani, etc.), or the Infinitive with the pronom. suffix -äsh, etc., invariably the literary form only was given.

page 415 note 2 In the colloquial and in Khorasani bar, war, wa-, etc., as equivalents to ba- and bi- are extremely common both with verbs and with nouns.