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Two Fragments from a Middle Persian Codex in Manichaean Script with Hymns to the Sun God and to Mani
Two unpublished Manichaean Middle Persian texts from the Berlin Turfan collection are here edited and commented upon for the first time. The two folios, in parts severely damaged, are from a same codex containing hymns. In the remaining parts a hymn to Mani, containing interesting references to the forerunning Prophets, a hymn to the Sun God, and a hymn to the Chariots of the Sun and the Moon are present.
Copyright (c) 2026 Enrico Morano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Who Owns What? Possessive Constructions in Northern Talyshi (Anbarāni and Lankarāni Dialects)
Talyshi, a Northwestern Iranian language spoken in Iran and the Republic of Azerbaijan, is traditionally divided into three dialect clusters: Northern, Central, and Southern. This paper investigates possessive constructions in two Northern Talyshi dialects, Anbarāni (Iran) and Lankarāni (Azerbaijan), drawing on original fieldwork and corpus data. In the attributive domain, both dialects share three strategies: oblique marking of the possessor, the optional preposition čə, and possessive pronouns. In the predicative domain, hitherto almost undocumented, they diverge sharply: Anbarāni employs a goal-schema construction, marking the possessor with the postposition ro and an existential predicate, whereas Lankarāni employs a genitive-schema construction, in which the oblique-marked possessor is obligatorily cross-referenced by an enclitic pronoun. This divergence tracks not the traditional tripartite classification of Talyshi but the dominant contact language of each dialect — Persian for Anbarāni, Azerbaijani for Lankarāni. The findings refine the place of Northern Talyshi within the typology of Western Iranian predicative possession and provide the first description of predicative possession for any Northern Talyshi variety spoken in the Republic of Azerbaijan.
Copyright (c) 2026 Hakob Avchyan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
“Black Day, White Face”: Color Terms in Kurmanji Kurdish Phraseology
This article examines color-related phraseological units in Kurmanji Kurdish, a topic that has received little dedicated attention despite growing cross-linguistic interest in color idioms. Drawing on lexicographic, folkloric, and ethnolinguistic sources, including material from the Yezidi communities of Armenia, it analyzes idioms built on five basic color terms: reş “black”, spî “white”, sor “red”, şîn “green/blue”, and zer “yellow”. For each, the study traces the etymology of the color word and identifies the cultural, social, and symbolic meanings it encodes. The analysis shows that reş is the most productive and diverse term, while the others range from purity and honor to vitality, fertility, and ambivalent symbolism. It offers a systematic account of color phraseology in Kurmanji and its place in Iranian ethnolinguistics.
Copyright (c) 2026 Tereza Amryan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Copyright (c) 2026 Vardan Voskanian https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
An Examination of Two Proverbs in Khotanese and Their Equivalents in Certain New Western Iranian Languages
Khotanese is a Middle Eastern Iranian language that was spoken in Khotan, located in the Xinjiang area of Turkestan, China, until the late 10th and early 11th centuries AD. The remaining Khotanese documents primarily consist of translations of Buddhist Sanskrit literature. One of the most significant poetic compositions in the Khotanese language is known as the Book of Zambasta. Unlike numerous other Khotanese texts that serve as translations of Buddhist literature, this particular work stands alone as an independent composition, although it is inspired by Buddhist texts. In this book, while explaining and interpreting religious teachings, references to stories and proverbs are occasionally made, the equivalents of which can be found in other languages, including Indian and Iranian languages. In the second chapter of the Book of Zambasta, two sentences address the themes of futile effort and exertion, which should be considered a type of proverb or maxim. In certain New Western Iranian languages, two proverbs akin to these Khotanese expressions remain prevalent, albeit with variations in vocabulary or usage. In this concise article, I will refer to these two proverbs in Khotanese along with their equivalents in certain New Western Iranian languages.
Copyright (c) 2026 Majid Tame https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Copyright (c) 2026 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Position of the Verbal Derivational Prefixes in the Sentence as a Distinguishing Feature of Persian Dialects from Other South-Western Iranian Dialects
The article examines a number of most commonly used prefixed verbs in Persian, Dari and Tajiki dialects as well as in the Bakhtiari dialects of Iran and the Tati dialects of the Caucasus. The present study has shown that in the Persian dialects of Iran and in Herati, the derivational (word-building) prefixes are separated from the word stem when the prefixed verbs are conjugated, while in the rest of the dialects considered in the article, such prefixes are permanently attached to the stem and are inseparable from it during conjugation. This fact leads to the conclusion that the detachment of the derivational prefixes from the stem in this group of verbs can serve as an important differentiating feature of the Persian dialects of Iran and the adjacent Khorasani dialects of northwestern Afghanistan in relation to the rest of the southwestern Iranian languages and dialects.
Copyright (c) 2026 Youli A. Ioannesyan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Contact Across the Iranian World: Curious Convergences between Kurdish and Balochi
It has not gone unnoticed that the Balochi imperfective aspect marker a- is superficially similar in form to the Central Kurdish marker a- (e- in Kurdish orthography) and nearly identical in function. Micro variation shows further similarities. For instance, the way these formatives idiosyncratically attach to certain verbs: come, bring, etc. have striking similarities in both groups. Additionally, the forms of past imperfective and past conditional forms show further convergence with the Kurdish system, differing from the original constructions preserved in Gorani and Zazaki. In light of new data from Kurdish, I evaluate the prospect of a relationship between these formations and others, arguing that these constructions ultimately have different etymologies. However, their convergence is far from coincidence.
Copyright (c) 2026 Shuan Osman Karim https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Identifying Daš Maštis in Pre-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema: A Linguistic-Semiotic Study
This study investigates the semiotic and linguistic construction of daš maštis-urban masculine figures that became prominent in mid-twentieth-century Iranian popular cinema within the broader cultural, social, and historical framework of Film-Farsi. Drawing upon the theoretical insights of Christian Metz, Roland Barthes, and Mikhail Bakhtin, the article examines how cinematic language produces and circulates ideology through intricate sign systems, embodied gestures, and vernacular speech. Through close analysis of canonical films such as Qaysar (1969), Daš Akol (1971), and other representative works, the study demonstrates that the daš mašti functions simultaneously as a linguistic, moral, and cultural signifier. Specifically, the research investigates linguistic features such as phonological variation, lexical creativity, idiomatic expressions, pragmatic markers of solidarity, and stylistic deviations from standard Persian, showing how these elements construct group identity and perform masculinity on screen. Employing a linguistic-semiotic approach, the study reveals that the daš mašti embodies a hybrid discourse-a synthesis of urban colloquial speech, moral codes associated with javanmardi, and performative markers of masculinity-that mediates between cinematic representation and prevailing social norms. Moreover, it highlights how their figures articulate tensions between modernity and tradition, authority and rebellion, and individual desire and communal expectation. Ultimately, the article argues that the daš mašti in pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema is not merely a cinemativ archetype or folkloric trope, but a complex social-linguistic construct through which cultural identity, morality, and ideological negotiation are expressed, contested, and disseminated to audiences, offering critical insight into both the filmic imagination and the socio-cultural dynamics of the era.
Copyright (c) 2026 Noonik Darbinyan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Nonverbal Element in Persian Verbal Multiword Expressions: A Corpus Annotation Approach
This article presents a linguistic framework for the identification and annotation of Persian (Farsi) Verbal Multiword Expressions (VMWEs), developed in alignment with the standards and methodologies set by the PARSEME Corpus—an international research network focused on the systematic analysis of multiword expressions across languages. The study aims to bridge the gap between universal annotation guidelines and language-specific grammatical features by tailoring the PARSEME framework to the structural and semantic properties of Persian. By extracting the characteristics of Persian VMWEs, particularly their nonverbal elements (preverbs) and their diverse syntactic and morphological patterns, this work contributes to a more refined understanding of Persian verbal idiomaticity and the advancement of natural language processing tasks. The article details the development of annotation guidelines that reflect both cross-linguistic categories and Persian-specific grammatical phenomena and the process of annotating a corpus of 5,617 sentences encompassing a wide range of Persian VMWEs including light verb constructions, verbal idioms, and prefix verbs. The practical applications of these guidelines in natural language processing are discussed, highlighting their potential to enhance machine understanding of complex verbal constructions, improve syntactic parsing accuracy, and support downstream tasks such as machine translation, information extraction, and semantic role labeling.
Copyright (c) 2026 Vahide Tajalli, Mehrnoush Shamsfard, Yalda Yarandi, Mahtab Sarlak, Arezoo Haghbin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Mapping the Languages of Kohgiluyeh va Boyer Ahmad Province, Iran: Is this Region Uniformly Lori-speaking?
Kohgiluyeh va Boyer Ahmad Province, which constitutes less than one percent of Iran’s land area and a similar proportion of its population, is located in the mountainous south-west of the country. In the literature as well as in popular discourse in Iran, this region has been regarded as uniformly Lori-speaking. In this paper, we survey the distribution of languages in the province and investigate whether any languages other than Lori are spoken there as a mother tongue. Adopting the methodology outlined in the Atlas of the Languages of Iran, this article presents static and interactive maps showing each of the province’s languages. The results of our survey indicate that in addition to seven distinct varieties of Southern Lori, Ghashghai Turkic, Khuzestani Arabic, and Bakhtiari are spoken as ancestral languages in the southern districts of Kohgiluyeh va Boyer Ahmad. Further, we signal the growing prevalence of Persian, the dominant prestige language across Iran, as a mother tongue.
Copyright (c) 2026 Mortaza Taheri-Ardali, Mansour Bozorgmehr, Erik Anonby https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Persian borrowings in Kashmiri: A Descriptive and Analytical Study
This paper provides a description and analysis of the Persian lexical and structural borrowings in the Kashmiri language. In doing so it explores the different strategies of nativization of Persian lexical borrowings in Kashmiri at phonological, morphological and semantic level and also analyses the structural borrowings and/or innovations as a result of contact at a morphological and syntactic level. The paper will also assess the constraints that limit Persian borrowings into Kashmiri vis-à-vis linguistic constraints which as Winford (2003:51) writes “often limit one language from borrowing heavily from another”.
Copyright (c) 2025 Midhat Shah https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
On the etymology of New Persian malang ‘intoxicated; unorthodox dervish’
This brief article discusses the etymology of the New Persian word malang, which has been widely borrowed into Indian languages. First its semantic range is established as encompassing the two basic meanings ‘intoxicated, drunk’ and ‘(unorthodox) dervish’, then a derivation from a Bactrian loanword into early New Persian is proposed, connecting it with the Indo-Iranian root *mad- ‘to be/become intoxicated’. The article thereby adds another lexical item to the list of Bactrian borrowings into New Persian and makes a contribution to the documentation of the Bactrian lexicon, as the presumable Bactrian source word is so far unattested in the known documents and inscriptions.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jakob Halfmann https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Ewer, Garden and Gardening: An Edition of Berk. 25 and Revised Readings of Berlin 26, Berk. 11, and Berk. 122 Documents Belonging to the Pahlavi Archive of Hastijan
The publication of research findings on the documents that today should be referred to as the Pahlavi Archive of Hastijan[1], began in 1991 with an article by Gignoux (1991). These studies were continued by Gignoux himself and Weber, resulting in significant advances in our understanding of the archive. Weber’s involvement in the research, along with his valuable contributions, notably accelerated progress and greatly improved the precision of the interpretations. Despite their extensive efforts, a portion of the documents still requires rereading and retranslation. It is important to emphasize, however, that the possibility for younger researchers like myself to undertake such tasks today is entirely thanks to the remarkable groundwork and deep expertise of both Gignoux and Weber.
Copyright (c) 2024 Nima Asefi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Vardan Voskanian https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Caucasian Persian (Tati) Fragments in Armenian Script: A Study of the Lord’s Prayer with Transliteration, Translation, and Comments
The study of certain languages, particularly their history, has always greatly benefited from, and continues to rely on, the material of the Armenian language and its dialects, studied from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, as well as the literature in Armenian script created in or translated into these languages. Within this context, the attention of scholars studying Western Iranian languages has primarily centered on two languages: Persian and Kurdish, the text corpora of both of which contain materials in Armenian script. To these two, Dimli or Zazaki can also be added, as separate words and expressions from this language appear in Dersim by Andranik (1900). This article aims to expand the list by including another Iranian language: Caucasian Persian (Tati), text corpus of which contains several fragments in Armenian script, all published during the last quarter of the 19th century. The article provides a general overview of Caucasian Persian fragments in Armenian script and examines the linguistic features of the Lord's Prayer, translated from Armenian into Caucasian Persian by Mkrtich Antonean-Dadayeanc' and published by Archbishop Mesrowb Smbateanc’ in 1896.
Copyright (c) 2025 Artyom Tonoyan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Progressive Tenses with the Verb “To Have” as a Peculiar and Exclusive Feature of Western Iranian Dialects Spoken in Modern Iran
The article considers the verb forms with the auxiliary verb “to have” used in Persian and other western Iranian dialects of modern Iran to express a continuous action taking place at the moment of speech in the present or at a certain moment in the past. Drawing upon an extensive material collected from a large number of dialects, the author proves that the geographic area within which these forms are found is limited to the territory of modern Iran, which makes them a distinguishing and exclusive feature of western Iranian (Persian and non-Persian alike) dialects spoken in modern Iran. The author supports the idea that these verb forms are completely “native” to the linguistic area they are found in and, therefore, despite the view-point of some scholars, could not have originated under the influence of western or any other foreign languages.
Copyright (c) 2025 Youli A. Ioannesyan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Reduplication in Lāri and Jibbāli: A Formal and Semantic Study
The focus of this study is two-fold. Firstly, it describes the most common types of reduplication in Lāri and Jibbāli. Secondly, it discusses their semantics. Reduplication is a morphological process whereby a base or part of it is repeated to express a meaning different from the base. The study explores the formation of 60 Lāri and Jibbāli reduplicative forms collected from 2 native Jibbāli speakers, and through a questionnaire distributed to 10 bilingual Lāri speakers. Although Lāri and Jibbāli belong to distant language families, the study shows that both languages employ full reduplication to accentuate adjectives or nouns. Lāri partial reduplication express meanings as diverse as emphasis, intensity, categorization, attenuation and addition whereas Jibbāli uses reduplication to mark transitivity and to convey continuity in borrowed bi-consonantal Arabic verbs.
Copyright (c) 2026 Muhammed Ourang, Khalsa Al-Aghbari https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Mirativity, as a distinct grammatical category, could be marked by different markers and strategies. In this paper, it is argued that, contrary to previous studies, Persian marks mirativity by using morphosyntactic forms. Three different grammatical tools are identified. First, it has a sentence final clitic ‘=ā’ used as mirative marker on its own right. It indicates that the information is newsworthy, unexpected and surprising. Second, the sentence final particle 'ke', among its different functions, marks mirativity, as well. Third, using different perfect verb forms in Persian is a mirative strategy, which is strongly connected to indirect evidentiality. The data from Persian widens our understanding of mirativity cross-linguistically, showing that a language could have different ways to mark it simultaneously.
Copyright (c) 2024 Mohammad Rasekh-Mahand https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
On the syntax of the Persian classical narrative poetry: constructions with a past participle in the Shāhnāme
This paper aims to describe a particular syntactic construction: that of dependent constructions (clauses, phrases) with a verb in the form of a past participle. Examples of them are mainly taken from Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāme and texts of early poetry, where they represent a prominent and well-attested linguistic phenomenon, but examples from early prose texts have also been given. In the Shāhnāme and early poetry texts, constructions with a past participle are usually placed after a clause with a finite verb in the past tense. They are endowed with a series of syntactic and semantic functions which are not always distinguishable from each other, such as adnominal relativizing, or adverbial modification through phrases or clauses, or predicative complement to the verb. Of these, only participial constructions with an adverbial value, mainly expressing time, but also manner, cause, and other relations, continue up to the present, though in a more rigid form: they are placed before the main clause, and have the value of a subordinate adverbial clause indicating anteriority to the action of the main clause.
Copyright (c) 2024 Paola Orsatti https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Similar patterns of vowel change in loanword adaptation have been documented for several Iranian languages and language varieties including Mazandarani. However, no convincing accounts of the nature of these processes in Mazandarani have been presented in the literature. We argue that for this language, these vowel alternations are best explained as low vowel dissimilation, a process affecting adjacent syllables with low vowels whereby one of the vowels is raised. Low vowel dissimilation is typologically rare, with the overwhelming majority of the cases identified belonging to the Oceanic family. To show that the vowel changes in question are indeed cases of low vowel dissimilation, we invoke evidence from the language’s verbal morphophonology where vowel changes show a more regular behavior and then expand the analysis to loanword adaptation. The dialects discussed in the articles are those of Amol, Reineh, and Babol. The two vowels that trigger the process in Mazandarani are the low vowels /æ/ and /ɑ/, but only the former can undergo change. We show that unlike almost all other known cases of this phenomenon, it is the second vowel that undergoes raising in the Mazandarani case in many situations, with this seemingly being the preferred way in the dialect of Babol. We end the paper with a discussion of why the two low vowels behave differently, suggesting that /ɑ/’s resistance to change is due to the fact that it is a long vowel phonologically, even if not phonetically.
Copyright (c) 2024 Mohsen Mahdavi Mazdeh, Sarah Nehzati https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Southwest Iranian languages are significantly underrepresented in academic literature, lacking comprehensive descriptions. This paper aims to fill this gap by examining the Lārestāni language variety spoken in Khonj, which is otherwise poorly known. In phonology, it is shown that uvular stops and fricatives have only recently infiltrated the Khonji sound system. Khonji stands out in the construction of noun phrases due to the presence of a deictic suffix and an intricate system of adpositions. The verb inflection in Khonji is notable for its ten identified aspectual and modal affixes. Combinations of these affixes give rise to a system of five simple tenses (surpassing the previously identified four), alongside corresponding progressive tenses, supplemented by at least four identified subjunctive tenses. The binary stative-dynamic distinctions in posture verbs, as illustrated in a diagram for 'sit', align more closely with English than Persian. Ergativity is prominently manifested through two sets of person markers, creating phrases similar to Middle Persian and counterintuitive to New Persian. Experiencer constructions characterize the expressions of possession and modals in the language.
Copyright (c) 2024 Habib Borjian https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
A New Possible Etymology for the Classical Persian Particle mar
The etymology of the Classical Persian particle mar, which is traditionally believed to have an emphatic or restrictive sense, has long been an enigma to scholars of Iranian philology and Persian linguistics, esp. because there is no trace of it in the extant Middle Persian texts. Different etymologies have so far been proposed for mar, but it is often compared with the Early Judaeo-Persian preposition azmar (i) “for” and therefore believed to have originated from the word mar “number; account”. The present paper reviews all previous studies and attempts to provide a new possible etymology, according to which mar is a focus marker derived through a grammaticalization process from the Bactrian word μαρο [mar] “here”.
Copyright (c) 2024 Hassan Rezai Baghbidi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Where the Demons Fell. A Manichaean Sogdian Manuscript in Sogdian Script from Mani’s Book of the Giants
Two unpublished Sogdian fragments in Sogdian Script of the Berlin Turfan collection, both from the same page and glassed together, contain a cosmogonic text on the falling of the demons/archons to the four directions of the earth and part of the myth of the creation of the protoplasts by the archdemons Šaqlūn and Pēsūs. This text will be proposed here as part of the Sogdian version of Mani’s Book of the Giants.
Copyright (c) 2024 Enrico Morano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
EZAFE IN THE CONTEXT OF CPS: Evidence from three Iranian languages
The present study investigates the distribution of the Ezafe (EZ) morpheme in adnominal clauses in three Iranian languages, namely Persian, Kurmanji (Northern Kurdish), and Zazaki, demonstrating that the behavior of EZ in these languages challenges the case analysis of EZ, suggesting instead a compatibility with the inversion analysis of EZ. In contrast to the prediction made by the case analysis, it is shown that EZ is required before [–N] modifiers such as CPs. First, EZ is consistently used in restrictive relative clauses (RCs) in all three languages, with Persian using an allomorph of EZ in this context, contrasting with Kurmanji and Zazaki, which use the regular form of EZ. Non-restrictive RCs present divergence: while Persian does not allow EZ in this environment, Zazaki and Kurmanji employ regular and anaphoric EZ (AEZ) forms, respectively. Following de Vries (2006), non-restrictive RCs are treated as restrictive RCs with a silent head, aligning the distribution of EZ in these languages with its distribution after a silent noun: Persian lacks EZ here, while Zazaki and Kurmanji use EZ and AEZ, respectively. Second, in Noun-Complement Clauses (NCCs), Kurmanji and Zazaki consistently use regular EZ, while Persian offers two options: the allomorph of EZ used with CPs or no EZ at all. Two possible structures are proposed for NCCs, one with and one without inversion, attributing the distribution of EZ to the structure involving inversion. This study shows that EZ is present in CP contexts and its distribution in these languages follows from the general behaviour of EZ and the syntax of N-CP structures.
Copyright (c) 2024 Songül Gündoğdu , Arsalan Kahnemuyipour, Marcel den Dikken https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
About šekam and šotor: The Development of the Initial Vs/šC- in Middle and New Persian
The purpose of this paper is to survey the phonological evolution of the initial sequence Vs/šC- in Persian as reflected, for instance, in Middle Persian iškamb > New Persian šekam ‘belly’, and to explore philological issues associated with this evolution.
Copyright (c) 2024 Salman Aliyari Babolghani https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Vardan Voskanyan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0