Persian (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- Persian by Yavar Dehghani
This booklet provides a brief sketch of Persian grammar written by a native-speaking linguist. Ch. [End Page 170] 1, ‘Introduction’, presents brief background information on Indo-Iranian, Old Persian and Avestan, Farsi (Persian) dialects, and previous works on the language (1–3). Like the rest of the monograph, it contains numerous stylistic infelicities and typographical errors, not to mention factual mistakes. An example of the latter concerns the author’s statement that Pahlavi (Middle Persian) ‘was written by [sic] an ideo-graphic script’ (2). Pahlavi uses an alphabetic/abjad script derived from Aramaic, augmented by several Aramaic ideograms pronounced in Persian fashion.
Ch. 2, ‘Phonology’, covers the consonants and vowels (4–8). Dehghani states that /n/ has a ‘velarised allophone’ which occurs before /g/ (5). This should be corrected to read ‘velar’. Concerning the vowel system, we note the following awkward descriptive statement: ‘We can find six vowels in the phonological system of Persian’ (6). Why not just report that Persian has six vowels?
Ch. 3, ‘Morphology’, discusses derivational and inflectional affixes, compounding, and reduplication (following D’s order of presentation) (9–18). In his discussion of plurality, mention is made of the suffixes -hā,-ān, and -āt, the last being the Arabic feminine sound plural (12–13); yet there is no mention of the commonly occurring broken plurals originally borrowed from Arabic. One occurs in a text (väsāyel ‘things’ [58]).
Ch. 4, ‘Syntax of simple clauses’, presents the basic SOV word order of simple sentences (19–42). It is inconsistent of the author to present some sentences in colloquial Persian—for example, an xube ‘that is good’ (32)—whereas most other sentences are presented in standard Persian: bačče gorosne äst ‘the child is hungry’ (24) or adäm äz- [sic] kar kärdän xäste mishäväd (note sh for /š/) ‘One becomes tired of working’ (33).
Ch. 5, ‘Syntax of complex clauses’, presents causative constructions, embedded clauses, complement clauses, and relative clauses (43–56). Many of the illustrative sentences emphasize that the complementizer ke ‘that’ is optional ‘with the indicative, subjunctive complement clauses but not with the infinitive ones’ (54).
The appendix consists of two Persian texts (57–60) in colloquial Tehrani. One can easily spot this dialect by the phonological shift of -ān to -ūn, for example, ūnja ‘there’, ūnhā ‘those’, and xūne ‘house’ (58), as well as by syllable loss in the verb, for example, beräm ‘I should go’ for beräväm (59). An English translation given is incorrect: ‘And then we returned home afternoon’ (58).
Let me comment on the bibliography (61–63). Three of the author’s unpublished papers appear in this thin list of references, whereas the literature on this important Asian language is now quite large (see Shahram Ahadi, New Persian language and linguistics: A selected bibliography up to 2001, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2002).
This essay falls short from both the editorial and the substantive points of view, leaving much to be desired. The linguist seeking an overview of the structure of contemporary Persian would do better to consult a more established author, such as Ann Lambton, mentioned in the author’s bibliography (62).
