A literary history of Persia

PERSIAN DIALECTS 27" Pehlevi-Musulman."JHe remarks that, amongst otherthe root kar- underlies the whole verb whichdifferences,"signifies to " do," to make," in the Avestic language ;whilein Old Persian the aorist, or imperative, stern of this verb(as in Modern Persian ) is kun- ;and again that the root signifying" to speak," " to say,"in Avestic is aoj-, vach- ywhilein Old Persian it is gaub-. Now while in Modern Persianis the lineal descendant of Old(which, as we have seen,Persian) the verbs signifying "to do," "to say," are kardan(imperative kun] and gujtan (imperative gu, ghy) in thoseydialects which he calls " Modern Medic " the stem kar- ispreserved throughout (aorist karam instead of kunam^ &c.),and words" " denoting speech," to speak," are derived from aroot vdj- or some similar basis corresponding to the Avesticaoj-y vach-. This test is employed by M. Huart in classifyinga given dialect as " Medic " or " Persian." According to thisingenious theory the language of the Avesta is still representedin Persia by a number of dialects, such as those used in thequatrains of Baba T&hir (beginning of the eleventhcentury),in the *Jawidan-i-Kabir (fifteenth century), and, at the presentday, in the districts of Qohrud and Siwand, and amongst theZoroastrians of Yazd and Kirman. It is also to be noted thatthe word for " I " in the Talish dialect is, according toBerdsine, 2 az, which appears to be a survival of the Avesticazem (Old Persian adam}. It is to be expected that a fullerand more exhaustive study of the dialects stillspoken invarious parts of Persia (which, notwithstanding the richmaterials collected, and in part published, by Zhukovski,3 arestill inadequately known to us) will throw more lighton thisquestion. Darmesteter, however, in another work (Chansons1They are, in fact, commonly called Pahlawi by the Persians, and wereso as early as the fourteenth century of our era e.g., by Hamdu'llah Mustavvfiof Qazwin. Cf. Polak, loc. cit.* Recherches sur les Dialectes Persans, Kazan, 1853, pp. 31, etseqq.3Materialy did izuchcma Persidskikh Narechij, part i (Dialects ofKashan, Vanishun, Qohrud, Keshe, and Zefre), St. Petersburg, 1888.