Т. 1. «Азия и Африка: Наследие и современность»

Asia and Africa: their Heritage and Modernity. Vol. 1 107 Источниковедение и историография Афганистана и Ирана Ioannesyan Yu. A. (Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, RAS, St Petersburg) Some Peculiar Traits Common to Certain Persian and Other Western Iranian Dialects Reflected in the Language of the “ Tabaqat as-sufiya ” by A. Ansari The study considers certain peculiarities shared by a number of western Iranian dialects and, not observed in the three modern literary forms of New Persian: literary Iranian Persian (Farsi), Afghan Persian (Dari) and Tajiki. These peculiar features go back to Medieval Times and are attested by an 11 th century treatise “Tabaqat as-sufiya” consisting of utterances of A. Ansari, the outstanding mystic and com- mentator of the Qur’an, whose language reflects some traits of the old Herati dialect. The language of the treatise was studied by the famous iranoligist W. A. Ivanow. The present study analyzes some dialectal features common to Khorasani Persian varieties, including Herati, the Sistani dialect, the Tati varieties in the Caucasus, the dialects of central Iran spoken by Zoroastrians and some others. Among the features of the language of the “Tabaqat as-sufiya” , W. A. Ivanow indicates a striking tendency towards an enclitic use of personal pronouns as well as combinations of prepositions, conjunctions etc. with the 3 rd person pronoun sin- gular employed enclitically. This tendency is expressed in writing of a preposition, a conjunction, or a particle jointly with the 3 rd person pronoun. Ivanow suggests that this phenomenon may be partly caused by some peculiarities of the Khorasani phonetics. The most convincing examples of these combinations found in the “Tabaqat as-sufiya” are as follows: . All of these are combinations of a preposition, a conjunction or a particle ( juz , bā/ bāz , barāyi , čun , ham ) with the 3 rd person pronoun singular ū/ō employed encliti- cally. Moreover, is, apparently, a triple combination, because it also contains preposition az : juz + az + ū/ō > juzzū/ō . Aremarkable feature of the present-day Herati dialect (less frequently observed in other Khorasani dialects) is the enclitic use of the 3 rd person pronouns both singular and plural. In Herati these have fully replaced the 3 rd person pronominal enclitics -eš/- aš , -ešân . The 3 rd person pronouns when used enclitically are not stressed and may undergo certain qualitative and quantitative changes. The enclitic use of personal (and demónstrative) pronouns is not a rare phenomenon in Iranian dialects of the south- western type. Cf. the Sistani variety of Persian (including the dialect spoken in Serakhs): sar-n-a ( -n < on “this; he”) “his head”, bré-y-u ( u “he”) “his brother”, psé-y-u “his son” etc. A similar situation is observed in the Tati dialects of the Caucasus in which 3 rd person singular pronominal enclitics have originated from demonstrative/personal pronouns: bælÿq di ki kar i pís-ÿ “the fish saw that things (lit. his things) were not going well for him.” That the enclitic here is originally the respective personal pronoun is confirmed not only by the fact that the former is phonetically identical to the latter but also by an analogy with other pronominal enclitics in Tati varieties in which all