Persian Language

Johnson, Scott Fitzgerald. 2018. “The Languages of Christianity on the Silk Roads and the Transmission of Mediterranean Culture into Central Asia.” In Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity: Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppe, ca. 250–750, edited by Nicola Di Cosmo and Michael Maas, 206–219. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

From the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Indian intellectuals produced numerous Sanskrit-Persian bilingual lexicons and Sanskrit grammatical accounts of Persian. However, these language analyses have been largely unexplored in modern scholarship. Select works have occasionally been noticed, but the majority of such texts languish unpublished. Furthermore, these works remain untheorized as a sustained, in-depth response on the part of India's traditional elite to tremendous political and cultural changes. These bilingual grammars and lexicons are one of the few direct, written ways that Sanskrit intellectuals attempted to make sense of Indo-Persian culture in premodern and early modern India. Here I provide the most comprehensive account to date of the texts that constitute this analytical tradition according to three major categories: general lexicons, full grammars, and specialized glossaries. I further draw out the insights offered by these materials into how early modern thinkers used language analysis to try to understand the growth of Persian on the subcontinent.

This article constitutes a preliminary attempt to explore the geographical dimension of premodern Persian lyric poetry from the perspective of the relationship between the historical adherence of a text to external reality and the rhetorics of intertextuality and performativity. The pretext for this exploration is the poem known as “Tork-e Shirazi” or “The Turk from Shiraz,” one of the most celebrated ghazals of Hafez of Shiraz. The analysis focuses in particular on the first two lines of the ghazal, whose rich and ambiguous imagery has challenged the community of readers, interpreters, and scholars for centuries. On the basis of historiographical, formalist, and poststructuralist approaches to the study of lyric poetry, the article outlines a generative paradigm that analyzes a given text from the perspective of its abstract, genre-specific, conventionally negotiated, and referential levels of meaning. The contribution of geocritical studies will be combined with rhetorical analysis to conceive of Hafez’s text as a geopoetic map in which the cities of Shiraz, Samarkand, and Bukhara are put in conversation with the mental and historical representations of Iran and India between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, during the transition from the Mongol to the Timurid models and ideals of power.

This paper discusses a phenomenon that has recently been observed in areas with a large migrant population in European cities: the rise of new linguistic practices among adolescents in multiethnic contexts. The main grammatical characteristics that have been described for them are phonological/phonetic and lexical influences from migrant languages, and (2) morpho-syntactic reductions and simplifications. In this paper, I show that from a grammatical point of view, morphosyntactic reductions are only part of the story. Using 'Kiezdeutsch' as an example, the German instance of such a youth language (which may be the one with most speakers), I discuss several phenomena that provide evidence for linguistic productivity and show that they evolve from a specific interplay of grammatical and pragmatic features that is typical for contact languages: grammatical reductions go hand-in-hand with productive elaborations that display a systematicity that can lead to the emergence of new constructions, indicating the innovative grammatical power of these multiethnolects.

Per­sian com­plex pred­i­cates pose an in­ter­est­ing chal­lenge for the­o­ret­i­cal lin­guis­tics since they have both word-​like and phrase-​like prop­er­ties. For ex­am­ple, they can feed deriva­tion­al pro­cess­es, but they are also sep­a­ra­ble by the fu­ture aux­il­iary or the nega­tion pre­fix.

Var­i­ous pro­pos­als have been made in the lit­er­a­ture to cap­ture the na­ture of Per­sian com­plex pred­i­cates, among them anal­y­ses that treat them as pure­ly phrasal or pure­ly lex­i­cal com­bi­na­tions. Mixed anal­y­ses that an­a­lyze them as words by de­fault and as phras­es in the non-​de­fault case have also been sug­gest­ed.

In this paper, I show that the­o­ries that ex­clu­sive­ly rely on the clas­si­fi­ca­tion of pat­terns in in­her­i­tance hi­er­ar­chies can­not ac­count for the facts in an in­sight­ful way un­less they are aug­ment­ed by trans­for­ma­tions or some sim­i­lar de­vice. I then show that a lex­i­cal ac­count to­geth­er with ap­pro­pri­ate Im­me­di­ate Dom­i­nance (ID) schema­ta and an ar­gu­ment com­po­si­tion anal­y­sis of the fu­ture aux­il­iary has none of the short­com­ings that clas­si­fi­ca­tion-​based anal­y­ses have and that it can ac­count for both the phrasal and the word-​like prop­er­ties of Per­sian com­plex pred­i­cates.

There have been a number of important efforts to map out the languages of Iran, but until now no language atlas, or even a comprehensive and detailed country-level language map, has been produced. One of the recent initiatives which aims to fill this gap is the online Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI) (http://iranatlas.net). This article delineates objectives of the ALI research programme, atlas architecture, research methodology, and preliminary results that have been generated. Specific topics of interest are the structure and content of the linguistic data questionnaire; the handling of contrasting perspectives about the status of “languages” and “dialects” through a flexible multi-dimensional classification web; and the role of ongoing comparisons between language distribution assessments and hard linguistic data.

Language documentation has been carried out in Iran since the late 1800s but in a sporadic way, and even now, the scholarly picture of the country's linguistic landscape is fragmentary. The present article responds to this state of affairs in a modest way by working toward a systematic overview of the language situation in one area of the country: Chahar Mahal va Bakhtiari Province of western Iran, where the high Zagros Mountains open onto the Iranian Plateau. In this study, conducted in the context of the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI) research programme, we chronicle our research process for this region, beginning with an inventory of languages spoken here-varieties of Bakhtiari, Charmahali, and Turkic-and an overview of their geographical distribution. This initial step enabled us to select 30 varieties from 26 locations across the province for in-depth research, including implementation of the ALI language data questionnaire. Data generated by the study have resulted in two language distribution maps as well as a series of linguistic structure maps. Initial analysis of lexical and phonological data provides insight into defining features of each language as well as structures shared between them as a result of language contact in the region.

This paper is the first substantial study of the Jilwa-yi ẕāt, an unabridged Persian verse translation of the tenth skandha of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, completed in Delhi in 1732–33 by Amānat Rāy, a Vaiṣṇava pupil of the influential poet-philosopher Mīrzā ‘Abd al-Qādir Bīdil. The paper focuses especially on the textualization of Kṛṣṇa and Kṛṣṇaite devotion within the framework of Persian literary conventions and the dominant Ṣūfī-Vedāntic conceptual atmosphere, with a special attention for the intertextual ties with the works of Bīdil. A few philological remarks on the contours of a hitherto largely ignored Kṛṣṇaite subjectivity in Persian are also included.

Brahman Sanskrit intellectuals enjoyed a century of relations with the Mughal elite. Nonetheless, such cross-cultural connections feature only sporadically in Persian chronicles, and Brahmans rarely elaborated on their imperial links in Sanskrit texts. In this essay I analyze a major exception to the Brahmanical silence on their Mughal connections, the Kavīndracandrodaya (“Moonrise of Kavīndra”). More than seventy Brahmans penned the poetry and prose of this Sanskrit work that celebrates Kavīndrācārya’s successful attempt to persuade Emperor Shah Jahan to rescind taxes on Hindu pilgrims to Benares and Prayag (Allahabad). I argue that the Kavīndracandrodaya constituted an act of selective remembrance in the Sanskrit tradition of cross-cultural encounters in Mughal India. This enshrined memory was, however, hardly a uniform vision. The work’s many authors demonstrate the limits and points of contestation among early moderns regarding how to formulate social and historical commentaries in Sanskrit on imperial relations.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Jain leaders faced a series of religious questions at the royal Mughal court. At the request of their imperial Muslim hosts, Jain representatives discussed aspects of both Islam and Jainism on separate occasions, including the veracity of Islam,whether Jains are monotheists, and the validity of Jain asceticism. The Mughals sometimes initiated these conversations of their own accord and at other times acted on the prompting of Brahmans, who had political and religious interests at stake in encouraging imperial clashes with Jain leaders. Jain authors recorded these exchanges in numerous Sanskrit texts, which generally remain unknown to Mughal historians and Sanskrit scholars alike. I examine the Jain accounts of these cross-cultural debates and expound their political, religious, and intellectual implications. These engagements showcase how the Mughals negotiated religious differences with diverse communities in their kingdom. Furthermore, the Sanskrit narratives of these dialogues outline complex theological visions of how Jain beliefs and practices could thrive within a potentially hazardous Islamicate imperial order. More broadly Jain and Mughal discussions provide rich insight into key developments in religious precepts and local identities in early modern India.

The present study investigates immigrant parents’ family language policies in regards to their children’s heritage language development and maintenance by utilizing Spolsky’s theoretical model on which research on family language policy (FLP) considerably draw. Following the three core components of the FLP model, Iranian parents’ beliefs, practices and efforts in relation to their children’s home language (i.e. Persian/Farsi) acquisition and maintenance are investigated. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews with twenty-five parents of Persian-English bilinguals (6–18 year old) in New Zealand. The findings reveal that although the parents hold positive beliefs towards the family language acquisition and maintenance, there are discrepancies between their language ideologies and family language practices. In light of these inconsistencies between parents’ beliefs and their actual family language practices and efforts to preserve the heritage language, we argue that to raise their children bilingually, immigrant parents should not only have strong beliefs towards family language acquisition and maintenance, but also their everyday practices and efforts should be in line with their beliefs.

Since the late 19th century, despite multi-cultural and multilingual composition of Iranian population, Persian nationalism has functioned as the ideology of the state. Persian intelligentsia have formulated a set of historical and cultural referents that enabled them to present the Persian language and identity as primordial and all-inclusive of all Iranians. By the advent of the modern nation-state, during Pahlavi dynasty, the non-Persian identities were brutally repressed in favor of the “One Country, One Nation, and One Language” policy. Through the adoption of such a policy and with the help of Persian intellectual and literati classes, the state was able to impose Persian identity as the singular “Iranian identity” and systematically marginalize and criminalize the non-Persian identities, treating them as “manufactured ethnic identities.” Being declared as “manufactured,” non-Persian identities are consequently perceived as constant threats to the territorial integrity and ideological monologue of the sovereign. This paper, therefore, aims to critically reassess “Iranian identity” and its production of “internal colonized Other.” It argues that through such an “internal othering” that Persian nationalism, backed by the combined force of a military and “privileged epistemology” has generated and sustained “the process of internal colonization.”

The ideology and worldviews of a community may be shifted and modified through social changes brought about by political upheavals. In a country like Iran, the Islamic revolution (1979/80) has played a major role in re-shaping the ideology of the governing body which among many other things involves modifications in the language policy. After the revolution, Persian speakers were encouraged to be more conservative in their use of language. As a result, those who tended to produce discourse which was more conservative and Islam-oriented became more popular and respected among the Iranian people. Ideology is one of the major factors which influences the manipulation of language use in translation. Prefaces and introductions which form the paratexts to a translated product often contain expressions of a translator’s ideology, and this usually manifests itself in the translation product. This study aims to describe the ideological impact of the social situation both in the pre- and post-revolutionary era in Iran on translations of George Orwell’s famous political novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) into Persian. This study will, therefore, compare the prefaces in three Persian translations of Nineteen Eighty-Four which were produced before and after the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution. The three Persian translations are by Mehdi Bahremand (1976), Zhila Sazegar (1980) and Saleh Hosseini (1982). This study employs Farahzad’s (2012) second dimension of the three-dimensional translation criticism model i. e. paratextual analysis alongside Lefevere’s (1992) theory of manipulation to investigate some of the lexical differences that manifest themselves in the pre-and post-revolutionary Persian translations of Nineteen Eighty-Four which reflect the personal ideologies of the three Persian translators as explicitly or implicitly expressed in their prefaces.

Persian language manuals uniformly adopt national categories such as Persian/Farsi (Iran), Dari (Afghanistan) and Tajik (Tajikistan). These categories at once impose an imagined contrast between the languages at the high register that is in fact marginal, while occluding profound linguistic variation within these nation-states at colloquial registers. Similar schemas apply to Central Asian Turkic languages such as Uyghur and Uzbek, which are closely related at the formal/literary register, but regionally diverse at lower registers. This dominant instructional approach ill prepares language learners for engaging the region on its own terms, rather than through the lens of nationalist aspirations. Students would be better served by an integrative method that teaches a transnational high language (in the case of Persian) while introducing a diverse range of dialects. This article was also adapted for a general audience in “On Language: The Many Flavors of Persian in Eurasia,” EurasiaNet, October 11, 2017.

The Iranian languages spoken by the Jews are often lumped under the term “Judeo-Persian.” Yet properly construed, the latter term refers to forms of Persian written with the Hebrew script. The corpus of Judeo-Persian texts is significant for both linguistic and literary reasons, because it includes some of the earliest documents of New Persian, and because it constitutes a sizable literature written by Persian Jews. However, there are also several spoken languages, different from Judeo-Persian, that also belong to the Iranian stock and are associated with Jewish populations in Iran. What we refer to here as “Judeo-Median” are a number of languages that have their core in central Iran and are/were spoken by the Jewry of Isfahan, Kashan, Yazd, and outlying western towns. All of these varieties are on the verge of extinction, both in their original homeland and in diaspora. Belonging to the Northwest group of Iranian languages, Judeo-Median differs from Persian (a Southwest language) not only in pedigree but also in its vocabulary and grammar—rendering it unintelligible to Persian monolinguals. This article studies the Judeo-Median dialects collectively, exhibiting their major similarities and differences, and attempting to enumerate and arrive at a tentative classification.

Delaying the appearance of a verb in a noun-verb dependency tends to increase processing difficulty at the verb; one explanation for this locality effect is decay and/or interference of the noun in working memory. Surprisal, an expectation-based account, predicts that delaying the appearance of a verb either renders it no more predictable or more predictable, leading respectively to a prediction of no effect of distance or a facilitation. Recently, Husain et al. (2014) suggested that when the exact identity of the upcoming verb is predictable (strong predictability), increasing argument-verb distance leads to facilitation effects, which is consistent with surprisal; but when the exact identity of the upcoming verb is not predictable (weak predictability), locality effects are seen. We investigated Husain et al.'s proposal using Persian complex predicates (CPs), which consist of a non-verbal element—a noun in the current study—and a verb. In CPs, once the noun has been read, the exact identity of the verb is highly predictable (strong predictability); this was confirmed using a sentence completion study. In two self-paced reading (SPR) and two eye-tracking (ET) experiments, we delayed the appearance of the verb by interposing a relative clause (Experiments 1 and 3) or a long PP (Experiments 2 and 4). We also included a simple Noun-Verb predicate configuration with the same distance manipulation; here, the exact identity of the verb was not predictable (weak predictability). Thus, the design crossed Predictability Strength and Distance. We found that, consistent with surprisal, the verb in the strong predictability conditions was read faster than in the weak predictability conditions. Furthermore, greater verb-argument distance led to slower reading times; strong predictability did not neutralize or attenuate the locality effects. As regards the effect of distance on dependency resolution difficulty, these four experiments present evidence in favor of working memory accounts of argument-verb dependency resolution, and against the surprisal-based expectation account of Levy (2008). However, another expectation-based measure, entropy, which was computed using the offline sentence completion data, predicts reading times in Experiment 1 but not in the other experiments. Because participants tend to produce more ungrammatical continuations in the long-distance condition in Experiment 1, we suggest that forgetting due to memory overload leads to greater entropy at the verb.

A Sequence Recall Task with disyllabic stimuli contrasting either for the location of prosodic prominence or for the medial consonant was administered to 150 subjects equally divided over five language groups. Scores showed a significant interaction between type of contrast and language group, such that groups did not differ on their performance on the consonant contrast, while two language groups, Dutch and Japanese, significantly outperformed the three other language groups (French, Indonesian and Persian) on the prosodic contrast. Since only Dutch and Japanese words have unpredictable stress or accent locations, the results are interpreted to mean that stress “deafness” is a property of speakers of languages without lexical stress or tone markings, as opposed to the presence of stress or accent contrasts in phrasal (post-lexical) constructions. Moreover, the degree of transparency between the locations of stress/tone and word boundaries did not appear to affect our results, despite earlier claims that this should have an effect. This finding is of significance for speech processing, language acquisition and phonological theory.

This paper deals with the presentation and evocation of emotion in performative face-to-face linguistic communication in Iran. Performance in linguistic communication is shown to involve the speaker's need to convey an impression of his or her own inner states. Since aectivity is one of the most dicult things to convey in face-to-face interaction, it is posited that a person employing successful linguistic performance skills must have a series of strategies available for demonstrating that he or she is truly conveying a speci®c intended emotion. This involves a two-stage process in which the speaker ®rst signals that a message conveys an emotion, then signals the nature of the emotion being conveyed. In order to accomplish this, culturally prescribed symbolic elements are presented by the speaker that must be performed for others to``read'' the emotional content of a communication. Added to the performative skills needed by the speaker is the requirement that the emotion conveyed be perceived as``sincere.'' This paper continues earlier research (Beeman 1986) demonstrating the eectiveness of speakers in Iran in creating the contexts for the interpretation of their own strategic communication.

Two experiments were carried out to examine whether the Persian word accent is deleted in two putative deaccenting contexts, post-focal regions and presupposed embedded clauses, to the extent that accentual minimal pairs become homophonous. A production experiment showed low F0 plateaus on the post-focal and presupposed words, while a perception experiment showed that such words are not recognized above a just-noticeable-difference baseline. The results confirm that accents are deleted in the contexts concerned and that accent location contrasts are neutralized.

A sociolinguistic analysis of emotion in Iranian culture and language use is developed. The work of Friedrich, Bateson, and others is drawn on to indicate how emotion is represented though metacommunicative, paralinguistic, and stylistic elements of language use. Communicative contexts in Iranian culture are marked in terms of two continua: one of personal and communicative intimacy, from “inside” (baten) to “outside” (zaher), and another of social hierarchy, from contexts indicating hierarchical relationships to those indicating equality. Affectivity in Persian language use is represented through intensification of a statement in relation to its contextual frame, through transposition of a linguistic form appropriate for one frame into another, or through culturally marked withdrawal from social interaction. It is argued that since emotions and psychological characteristics of individuals cannot be observed directly, attention should be focused on the expressive rules of culture rather than on “character” or “personality.”

The aim of this study was to develop and validate the Childhood Nonverbal Communication Scale (CNCS) to assess nonverbal communication skills in children from birth to 18 months old. An extensive review of existing research provided evidence used to generate items representative of nonverbal communication behaviors. The final version of the CNCS includes 37 items divided in two dimensions (CNCS-1 and CNCS-2) showing high content validity (item-rated content validity index ≥ 0.75). The scale was administered to 428 Iranian Persian-speaking children 3 to 18 months old with normal development. According to the findings, the CNCS showed strong internal consistency (KR-20 = 0.965). Further, it had good convergent validity based on a significant correlation between total scores and the results of the Persian version of the Production of Infant Scale Evaluation (PRISE-P) (r = 0.5, P < 0.01). Therefore, the CNCS is a promising tool for measuring nonverbal communication in Iranian children from birth to 18 months of age.

This paper focuses on Vahshi Bāfqi (d. 991/1583), especially on the sources for the study of his biography and works. The various editions of his collected poems are assessed. Next, all of the known early sources on Vahshi’s biography are presented, including a very important one that has not been published or cited before. Laying out all of these sources allows us to construct a more authoritative biography of the poet than has appeared to date. On a broader level, we learn that the careers and works of poets of Vahshi’s era are best understood in connection to one another. The tremendous growth of the tazkera genre in the Safavid-Mughal period makes possible this kind of research, focused on interconnectivity and cosmopolitanism in literary culture. In fact, the sources not only permit such an approach; they demand it. The paper ends with a series of recommendations for future research on Vahshi, his contemporaries, and the tazkeras themselves.

Highlights

• I present an explanation of instantaneous pragmatic linguistic choice behavior.
• I posit “thin slicing” and “emotional response” behavior as mechanisms.
• My conclusion supplements other explanations based on metapragmatics and habitus.
•  I analyze examples of pragmatic choice drawn from Japanese, Persian and Javanese.

Abstract

It is axiomatic in the study of pragmatics that speakers must make choices from a myriad of variants in phonology, morphology and syntax “on the fly” during the course of interaction. However, the specific psychological and neurophysiological mechanisms that both prompt these choices have largely been taken for granted. Theoretical approaches to this problem in the past have focused on linguistic mechanisms such as “metapragmatics” or cultural approaches such as the analysis of “habitus.” While acknowledging the importance of these approaches, in this paper I extend this view by suggesting that these instantaneous choices are largely governed by the same cognitive mechanisms that govern emotional response. Drawing on the work of contemporary neurophysiology, pragmatic philosophy and phenomenology, I draw on examples from Japanese, Persian and Javanese.

This study concerns the native language of Shirazi Jews, most of whom are living 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 sizable literature have survived up to the fifteenth century.

This chapter introduces Native Language Identification (NLID) and considers the casework applications with regard to authorship analysis of online material. It presents findings from research identifying which linguistic features were the best indicators of native (L1) Persian speakers blogging in English, and analyses how these features cope at distinguishing between native influences from languages that are linguistically and culturally related. The first chapter section outlines the area of Native Language Identification, and demonstrates its potential for application through a discussion of relevant case history. The next section discusses a development of methodology for identifying influence from L1 Persian in an anonymous blog author, and presents findings. The third part discusses the application of these features to casework situations as well as how the features identified can form an easily applicable model and demonstrates the application of this to casework. The research presented in this chapter can be considered a case study for the wider potential application of NLID.

This paper describes the CoreGram project, a multilingual grammar engineering project that develops HPSG grammars for several typologically diverse languages that share a common core. The paper provides a general motivation for doing theoretical linguistics the way it is done in the CoreGram
project and therefore is not targeted to computational linguists exclusively. I argue for a constraint-based approach to language rather than a generative-enumerative one and discuss issues of formalization. Recent advantages in the language acquisition research are mentioned and conclusions
on how theories should be constructed are drawn. The paper discusses some of the highlights in the implemented grammars, gives a brief overview of central theoretical concepts and their implementation in TRALE and compares the CoreGram project with other multilingual grammar engineering projects.

This paper examines the acquisition particularities of advanced-level students. It also investigates the use of content-based—in this case media material—in teaching advanced-level students, as well as the impact of teaching such material on the students’ writing ability and overall proficiency. Finally, the subtle differences between heritage learners and second language learners are analyzed and discussed. Therefore, this research encompasses both a quantitative and a qualitative study of the issue at stake to ensure reliability of the findings. The results of the study suggest that there is no significant difference between the number of errors made by heritage learners and second language learners; however, the sources of these errors are often different. These sources of error and their possible reasons are discussed in this paper.

Unlike previous studies, this book steps outside disciplinary and regional boundaries and gives comparative insights into the factors behind uniformity and variation in the Arabic-influenced writing traditions where cultures, languages and scripts interplay. One of the findings of this volume is that different domains of manuscript cultures have distinct paths of standardisation, so that orthography tends to develop its own standardisation principles irrespective of norms applied to layout and script types.

Khargi is spoken on the island of Kharg in the Persian Gulf. A member of the Southwest branch of the Iranian languages, Khargi is related to the languages spoken in the province of Fārs and along the coastal line down to the Strait of Hormuz, suggesting extensive maritime contact, yet does not lend itself to any of the known subgroups of the family. As Khargi remains largely obscure, this article offers a morphosyntax and lexical analysis based on published texts and those collected by the author. It investigates the linguistic position of Khargi based on comparative-historical phonology as well as areal features, with a look at cross-linguistic influence in the situation of language contact. By contrasting linguistic findings with details of history and economy, an attempt is made to date the original and later human settlements on the island. 1

Prosody plays an influential role in the recognition of Persian wh-in-situ questions (Shiamizadeh et al., in press). Perception of speech intonation is supported by several prosodic correlates (Lehiste, 1970). For instance, perception studies demonstrate that prosodic correlates do not contribute similarly to the identification of contrasts (oppositions) in speech intonation, and F0 contributes more prominently to the categorization of contrast in speech intonation (Lehiste, 1976; Peng et al., 2012). The current study manipulates a number of different prosodic correlates to investigate their relative contribution to sentence type categorization in Persian. This study also investigates whether identification is improved in congruent cue conditions in comparison to conflicting cue conditions. For this purpose, a perception experiment was designed in which native Persian speakers were required to listen to manipulated stimuli and decide if they perceived a wh-question or a declarative sentence. Based on the literature, we expect a primary role for F0 and a secondary role for duration in the perception of sentence modality contrasts. We also predict improved identification of sentence type in matching cue conditions in comparison to mismatch-ing cue conditions. The results of the study confirm our predictions, i.e. a primary role of F0, and an increased identification in the matching cue condition is applicable to the perception of the contrast between Persian wh-in-situ questions and declaratives.

Öz
Tarihî süreç içerisinde yoğun bir etkileşimde bulunan Türkçe ve Farsça birbirlerini etkilemiş, birbirleriyle kelime aşıverişinde bulunmuşlardır. Her iki dilin söz varlığında çok sayıda ortak kelimenin birikmesiyle, sonuçlanan bu etkileşim neticesinde her iki dilde kökeni ve telaffuzu aynı ancak anlam olarak farklılaşan veya zamanla anlam değişimine uğrayan çok sayıda ortak veya ödünç kelime bulunmaktadır.
İki dildeki ortak veya ödünç kelimeler, Farsça öğrenmek isteyen Türkçe konuşurlarına ciddi kolaylıklar sağlarken iki dildeki yalancı eş değer kelimeler, dil öğretimi/öğrenimi sırasında ciddi sorunlara yol açabilmektedir. Hedef dildeki yalancı eş değer kelimelerle karşılaşan Türkçe konuşuru, anadilden veya birinci dilinden olumsuz aktarım yaparak kelimeyi Türkçedeki anlamıyla algılamakta ve dil öğrenim sürecinde, dört temel becerinin öğreniminde zorluklar yaşamakta ve çeviri yaparken önemli hatalara düşmektedir. İki dildeki ortak söz varlığının avantajından istifade etmek isteyen öğretici/öğrenci yalancı eşdeğer kelimelerin farkında olmadığında; Farsça botri kelimesinin Türkçede şişe, Türkçedeki şişe kelimesinin Farsçada cam, Farsçadaki cam kelimesinin Türkçede kadeh, Türkçedeki kadeh kelimesinin Farsçada kâse, Farsçadaki kase kelimesinin Türkçede tas ve Türkçedeki tas kelimesinin Farsçada kel demek olduğunu bilemediğinde, bu durum büyük hatalara yol açabilecektir.
Tarama yöntemi takip edilerek yürütülen bu çalışma Farsça öğrenmek isteyen Türkiye Türkçesi konuşurlarının yalancı eş değer kelimeler konusunda farkındalık sahibi olmalarını ve dil öğretici/öğrencisinin bu yalancı eş değerliğe sahip kelimelerde anadilinden yapacakları olumsuz aktarmaları önleyebilmeyi amaçlamaktadır.
Diller arası yalancı eş değerlik kapsamında bu çalışmada, İran Farsçası ve Türkiye Türkçesi arasında anlam kayması veya anlam değişimine uğrayarak ortaya çıktığı tespit edilen 696 yalancı eş değer kelime incelenecektir. Çalışmanın temel verisini oluşturan bu 696 kelime İnönü Üniversitesi Farsça Kurslarına devam eden kursiyerlerin ödev ve dikte kâğıtlarına yönelik uygulanan yanılgı incelemesi çalışmasının sonuçlarından ve iki dilin temel sözlüklerine yönelik uygulanan kaynak tarama yöntemiyle elde edilmiştir. Derlenen kelimeler etimolojik kökenlerine göre Farsça, Türkçe, Arapça ve diğer diller şeklinde dört ana gruba ayrılarak tasnif edilecek ve dört ayrı tablo halinde değerlendirilmeye tabi tutulacaktır. Tablolarda her kelimenin kaynak dildeki ve hedef dildeki telaffuzunun yanı sıra her iki dildeki güncel anlamına da yer verilecektir.

FALSE FRIENDS IN TEACHING PERSIAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE IN TURKEY
(Iranian Persian and Turkey Turkish Sample)
Abstract
Turkish and Persian, which had an intense interaction throughout history, influenced each other and exchanged words. As a result of this interaction, which has resulted in the accumulation of a large number of common words in the vocabulary of both languages, there are many common or borrowed words in both languages that have the same origin and pronunciation, but differ in meaning or have had semantic change over time.
While common or borrowed words in two languages provide serious convenience to Turkish speakers who want to learn Persian, false friends in two languages can cause serious challenges during language teaching/learning. A Turkish speaker, who encounters false friends in the target language, perceives the word with its Turkish meaning by making a negative transfer from his mother tongue or first language, and has difficulties in learning four basic skills in the language learning process and makes important mistakes when translating between languages.
When the instructor/student who wants to take advantage of the common vocabulary in the two languages is not aware of the false friends in the two languages; If he does not know that the Persian word botri (bottle) means şişe (bottle) in Turkish, Turkish word şişe (bottle) means cam (glass) in Persian, Persian word cam (goblet) means kadeh (goblet) in Turkish, Turkish word kadeh (goblet) means kâse (small bowl) in Persian, Persian word kâse (small bowl) means tas (bowl) in Turkish, and Turkish word tas (bowl) means kel (bald) in Persian, these might cause huge mistakes.
This study, which was carried out by following the scanning method, aims to make Turkish speakers who want to learn Persian be aware of false friends and to prevent the language teacher/student from making negative transfers from their mother tongue in these false friends.
Within the scope of false friends between languages, 696 false friends, which were determined to have emerged by undergoing a semantic shift or meaning change between Iranian Persian and Turkey Turkish, will be examined in this study. These 696 words, which constitute the basic data of the study, were obtained from the results of the misconception analysis applied to the homework and dictation papers of the trainees attending İnönü University Persian Courses, and the literature review method applied to the basic dictionaries of the two languages. The compiled words will be divided into four main groups as Persian, Turkish, Arabic and other languages according to their etymological origins and will be evaluated in four separate tables. The tables will include the pronunciation of each word in the source language and the target language, as well as its current meaning in both languages.
Keywords: Persian, Turkish, Persian Teaching, False Friends.

The present study aimed to investigate the role of gender in Persian verbal humor. To do so, based on an Iranian mobile app, 354 trending jokes (‘liked’ by at least 50,000 users) were selected and scrutinized to discern how male and female Persian speakers were employed in creating humor. In the light of General Theory of Verbal Humor, the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data revealed that a statistically significant proportion of the online jokes were gender-biased. Furthermore, female Persian speakers were by far the main target of humor in these jokes. Further inspection also indicated that ‘marriage’, ‘reasoning ability and intelligence’, ‘beauty and make-up’, ‘general knowledge and skill’ in the female-focused humor and, ‘(feminine) beauty’, ‘heterosexual orientation’, and ‘social position’ in the male-focused humor were the major themes of ridicule. The findings suggest that Persian verbal humor serves as a true reflection of the Iranian society, mirroring post-revolutionary as well as recent socio-cultural developments. Moreover, gender roles in Persian verbal humor (and perhaps the society), are in a transitory shifting phase to the effect that traditionally masculine hegemonic concepts are giving way, albeit gradually, to emerging patterns which are more in favor of female Persian speakers.

Persian language has no functional equivalents of the English article system and many Persian ESL learners have difficulty in using English articles, particularly the definite article “the”. This study examined whether the accuracy of article use by the students varied with respect to the proficiency level and also investigated whether L1 plays role in corrects using article. The data were collected through two questionnaires. Statistical analyses of the participants’ performance are: Analyzing English item and Persian item and analyzing both English and Persian item by comparing with each other and comparing proficiency level. The result shows there is a significant difference among the proficiency levels in the term of using corrects article in the English items. The advanced student tried to avoid substitution “the” with “a”.

Unlike other writing systems that are readily classifiable as alphabetic or syllabic in their structure, the Indic Devanagari script (of which Hindi is an example) has properties of both syllabic and alphabetic writing systems. Whereas Devanagari consonants are written in a linear left-to-right order, vowel signs are positioned nonlinearly above, below, or to either side of the consonants. This fact results in certain words in Hindi for which, in a given syllable, the vowel precedes the consonant in writing but follows it in speech. The current research exploited this property of the script to examine when the disparity between spatial and temporal sequencing would incur a processing cost and the implications of the findings from naming speed, accuracy, and writing order for the level at which words in Devanagari are segmented. The results support a partly phonemic and partly syllabic level of segmentation, consistent with the structural hybridity of the script.

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.

Syntactically annotated data like a treebank are used for training the statistical parsers. One of the main aspects in developing statistical parsers is their sensitivity to the training data. Since data sparsity is the biggest challenge in data oriented analyses, parsers have a malperformance if they are trained with a small set of data, or when the genre of the training and the test data are not equal. In this paper, we propose a word-clustering approach using the Brown algorithm to overcome these problems. Using the proposed class-based model, a more coarser level of the lexicon is created compared to the words. In addition, we propose an extension to the clustering approach in which the POS tags of the words are also taken into the consideration while clustering the words. We prove that adding this information improves the performance of clustering specially for homographs. In usual word clusterings, homographs are treated equally; while the proposed extended model considers the homographs distinct and causes them to be assigned to different clusters. The experimental results show that the class-based approach outperforms the word-based parsing in general. Moreover, we show the superiority of the proposed extension of the class-based parsing to the model which only uses words for clustering.

Using electropalatographic (EPG) data, we study the coarticulatory effect of intervocalic contexts on the Persian coronal stops [t] and [d]. The EPG patterns demonstrate that [d] is produced in a more anterior place than [t], proving the former to be a dentialveolar consonant and the latter to be an alveolar one. The coarticulation index (CI) is calculated for each consonant flanked by the same vowels. The results obtained show that there is no significant difference between [t] and [d], in terms of coarticulation; however, based on the data we have, we can say that [t] is more resistant to coarticulatory effect than [d]. This result is in agreement with previous investigations which propose that laminals show stronger coarticulation resistance than apicals.

Modern Persian, also known as Farsi, has recently developed a periphrastic verbal construction to express the progressive and prospective aspects which uses the auxiliary dāštan(inf.)/dār- (pres. stem) ‘to have’. This construction was first reported in colloquial Persian by Zhukovskij (1888), and according to Windfuhr & Perry (2009:461), it has not “yet fully integrated into literary Persian”. This construction, in which both the auxiliary and the main verb get subject agreement, is syntactically limited in that it can be used only in the indicative mood and only in affirmative sentences.

Bybee et al.'s (1994:128) study of progressive in various language families shows no case of possessive HAVE functioning as the auxiliary verb of progressive constructions, and therefore, the source of this construction in Persian has been the topic of a few studied. In this paper, we evaluate one of the few proposals made in the literature for the source of this construction, namely, the one which proposes borrowing from Mazandarani, an Iranian language spoken on the northwest shores of the Caspian Sea, into Persian (Pistoso 1974 and Shokri 2015). In this proposal, it is hypothesized that the phonological similarity between the present stem of the progressive auxiliary in Mazandarani, i.e., [dær] ‘(locative) to be’, with the present stem of ‘to have’ in Persian, i.e., [dɑr], has led the bilinguals of Mazandarani and Persian to replicate the Mazandarani progressive construction, which originally involves the auxiliary ‘locative be’, as a new construction in Persian which involves the auxiliary ‘to have’. We put this hypothesis in the context of current theories of pattern replication, particularly the framework of ‘pivot-matching’, as described in Matras & Sakel (2007), and evaluate the hypothesis against some diachronic data from Mazandarani. We argue that both the social status of the two languages and Mazandarani’s diachronic data suggest an influence on the other direction, i.e., from Persian to Mazandarani, which means that the source of HAVE-progressives in Persian needs to be sought somewhere else.

It has been repeatedly observed that focus substantially changes the sentence prosody in many languages not only by increasing F 0 , duration, and intensity on the focused components but also by compressing the pitch range and intensity of post-focus elements. However, it is not yet fully clear in Persian what the main effect of focus is on pre-focus, on-focus and post-focus elements. To achieve this goal, we have embarked on a full-scale investigation of the phonetic realization of prosodic focus in Persian. The findings of this study reveal that focus dramatically changes the three regions. F 0 and duration has significantly increased in on-focus words without any significant change in intensity. Compared to their counterparts, pre-focus elements show weaker intensity but no change in duration and mean F 0 . Finally post-focus words show significant lowering of F 0 and decrease of intensity. The duration of post-focus words remains intact. Thus, according to the present data, it can be concluded that Persian, like English and Mandarin, falls into the category of PFC (postfocus compression) languages.

Purpose: In this study, we aimed to translate and test the validity and reliablity of the Persian version ofthe Manchester-Oxford Foot Questionnaire in foot and ankle patients.Methods: We translated the Manchester-Oxford Foot Questionnaire to Persian language according to theaccepted guidelines, then assessed the psychometric properties including the validity and reliability on308 patients with long-standing foot and ankle problems. To test the reliability, we calculated the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) for test–retest reliability and measured Cronbach’s alpha to test theinternal consistency. To test the construct validity of the Manchester-Oxford Foot Questionnaire we alsoadministered the Short-Form 36 to patients.Results: Construct validity was supported by significant correlation with SF36 subscales except for painsubscale of the persian MOXFQ with mental health of the SF36 (r = 0.207). Intraclass correlation coefficientwas 0.79 for the total MOXFQ and ranged from 0.83 to 0.89 for the three subscales. Cronbach’s alpha forpain, walking/standing, and social interaction was 0.86, 0.88, and 0.89, respectively, and was 0.79 for thetotal MOXFQ showing good internal consistency in each domain.Conclusion: The Persian Manchester-Oxford Foot Questionnaire health scoring system is a valid andreliable patient-reported instrument for foot and ankle problems.

This paper explores the discourse functions of Arabic-Persian codeswitching and the phonological/lexical outcomes of language contact among members of the Āl ʿAlī tribe in the United Arab Emirates and Hurmuzgān Province in Iran. The linguistic environment among the Āl ʿAlī is characterized by bilingualism and multidialectalism. In the spoken and written code, they generate a tetra-glossic switching between Modern Standard Arabic, Gulf Colloquial Arabic, Modern Standard Persian, Colloquial Persian and two Persian dialects: Bandarī and Ačumī. The study draws on recorded data with tribal members in the UAE and conversation threads of fellow Iranian tribesmen on social media sites. The main theoretical construct applied for the analysis is the Matrix Language-Frame model (Myers-Scotton 2002). It will be argued that the nature of codeswitching among the Āl ʿAlī is situational and transactional, both inter- and intra-sentential. Language and dialect choice is determined by the topic of the conversation, the interlocutors’ identity and their relationship to each other.

Food plays a central role in hospitality in virtually every culture on earth. Eating together - 'commensality'' is perhaps one of the most basic human social acts, and is imbued with a special ritual quality. In this paper I show that there are several stages that participants in commensality pass through from the outside world to the communal meal. The passage from stage to stage is effected through the use of linguistic/ behavioral routines that I call "pragmemic triggers. " The form of these triggers is different for different societies, but their structure and use is the same. To demonstrate this, I compare the passage to the meal in four widely dispersed cultures: Middle East, Japanese, German and American

This paper gives a novel approach of automatic speaker recognition technology, with an emphasis on text-dependent speaker recognition. Speaker recognition has been studied actively for several decades. In fact, Speaker recognition system may be viewed as working in four stages, namely, analysis, feature extraction, modeling and testing. After some preprocessing modules, we apply MFCC, as one of the most important feature extraction methods in this field of works, to speech signals independently in order to extract feature vectors. Afterwards, obtained vectors are used by training system to find codewords for ten users in our Persian database by LBG VQ. Finally, we use DTW technique for recognizing a speaker among all. Our experience strongly indicates that the identification rate over 96% can be achieved by the proposed algorithm.

In Islamic societies, there exists the belief that a compliment can attract the 'evil eye' unless it´s accompanied by expressions that invoke God's protection. The purpose of this research is to analyze the use of these expressions and to conduct a contrastive study of Arabic and Persian formulas against the evil eye. In this research, the importance of these expressions and the use of courtesy formulas in responses to compliments about appearance and possessions are analyzed. Participants of the research are: 10 female native speakers of Arabic (between 19 and 24 years old) and 10 female native speakers of Persian (between 27 and 40 years old). Women were chosen in the study as they use more frequently formulas that invoke God’s protection. All of them claimed to believe in the evil eye. Participants are requested to view two short videos in which the characters are talking about their appearance and possessions. Once they watch the videos, they recreate the dialogues in their own languages. The researchers analyze the use of formulas against the evil eye and the compliments responses and conduct a comparative study of the use of these formulas in Arabic and Persian.