The Meter and the Literary Language of Gūrānī Poetry
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The Meter and the Literary Language of Gūrānī Poetry Dissertation zur Erlangung des Grades der Doktorin der Philosophie an der Fakultät für Geisteswissenschaften der Universität Hamburg Asien-Afrika-Institut vorgelegt von Parvin Mahmoudveysi Hamburg 2016 1. Gutachter: Herr Professor Dr. Ludwig Paul 2. Gutachter: Herr Professor Dr. Philip G. Kreyenbroek Datum der Disputation: 04 März 2016 To my best friends: Kobra, Rebin, Denise and Nick Acknowledgements As the author of this thesis, I wish to acknowledge the support of many friends who helped me in this work. First of all, I would like to honor my colleague, Carsten Bettermann, who sadly forever left us at a young age. I was lucky to have many interesting discussions with him about the form of Old and Middle Iranian versification. Furthermore I had the good fortune to participate in his courses on Avestan and Middle Persian. He even kindly arranged a course for versification in Avestan. He greatly supported me as I prepared the section in this dissertation on Old Iranian languages. The death of this unbelievably talented person was a great loss for all the colleagues and students in the Asien-Afrika-Institut at the University of Hamburg. I would like to thank my professors Ludwig Paul, Philip Kreyenbroek, and Omid Tabibzadeh, who during the course of my studies have always supported me. I owe a debt of gratitude to two kind friends, Peter Keil and his wife Marie-Luise Keil, for their support. Peter Keil very kindly translated for me ten articles from French into German (Jean Kellens 2006; Jerzy Kuryłowicz 1952 and 1972; Gilbert Lazard 1984, 1985, and 1990; Antonie Meillet 1900 and 1925; Eric Pirart 2004; Hermann Trödel 1874). His work, which was supervised partly by Carsten Bettermann, was not only a big help for me, it was and will continue to be also of great benefit to Iranian studies in Germany. I am deeply indebted to Denise Bailey and Nicholas Bailey for their great help with the linguistic parts of this study and with correcting my English and formatting the text and examples. Much gratitude is also due Professor Günter Steffen Henrich, who very kindly and selflessly read the dissertation in its entirety and suggested improvements for the published version. His support is sincerely appreciated. I kindly thank Sokol Kondi, director of the United Nations Assistant Mission for Iraq‘s (UNAMI) regional office in Erbil, for his help with the translation of the poems into English and for the time that he gave me. Sincere thanks are also due to Paulien Bakker for helping with the translation of some of the poems into English. VI In 2009, I travelled with Professor Kreyenbroek, and then later alone in 2011, to do fieldwork in Iraqi Kurdistan for the project ―Documentation of Gorani, an endangered language of West Iran‖, which was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation‘s DoBeS (Dokumentation bedrohter Sprachen) program from 2007 to 2012. In conjunction with these field trips, the map for where Gūrānī speakers live was prepared (see page 6). While on those trips, I received help from Muħammad Malā Ħasan (Mayor of Khanaqīn), Ebrāhīm Bāǰałān, Bahman Ħamīd Feyzullāh Bēwyānī (leader of the tribe of Bēwyānī), Naǰm Aħmad Bāǰałān (an employee of the Red Crescent) and Rizgār Miħamad Maħmud (an employee of the television station Nawroz in Kirkuk). I am very grateful to all of these people as well as to Salam ʕabullāh and Ħasan Hayās for their hospitality during my trips to Kurdistan. Table of Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... V Abbreviations ........................................................................................................................... IX 1. Introductory matters ................................................................................................. 1 1.1 The state of the research ..................................................................................................... 1 1.2 The name ―Gūrānī / Gorānī‖ ............................................................................................. 2 1.3 The dialects of Gūrānī ......................................................................................................... 3 1.4 Population of Gūrānī speakers ........................................................................................... 7 1.5 Gūrānī as a literary and sacred language ......................................................................... 8 1.6 The corpus of Gūrānī poetry ............................................................................................ 12 2. Theoretical introduction ......................................................................................... 15 2.1 On a theory of versification .............................................................................................. 15 2.2 Metrical Typology ............................................................................................................. 21 3. Poetry in Old and Middle Iranian languages ........................................................ 27 3.1 Avestan versification ......................................................................................................... 27 3.1.1 Old Avestan ........................................................................................................................................ 32 3.1.2 Young Avestan ................................................................................................................................... 37 3.2 Middle Iranian versification ............................................................................................. 46 3.2.1 Middle Persian and Parthian ............................................................................................................... 47 3.2.2 Khotanese and Sogdian Versification ................................................................................................. 50 4. Poetry after the coming of Islam ............................................................................ 54 4.1 Early New Persian versification ....................................................................................... 55 4.2 Fahlavīāt ............................................................................................................................. 60 5. Selected phonological and grammatical features in Literary Gūrānī and in four spoken Gūrānī dialects............................................................................................................ 65 5.1 Assumptions and questions about the nature of Literary Gūrānī ................................ 65 5.1 The sources of the Gūrānī material ................................................................................. 67 5.1.1 The sources of the Literary Gūrānī material ....................................................................................... 67 5.1.2 The sources for the material from the four spoken Gūrānī dialects .................................................... 69 5.2 Phonology and orthography ............................................................................................. 69 5.2.1 The phoneme inventory of Literary Gūrānī ........................................................................................ 69 5.2.2 The orthography of Literary Gūrānī .................................................................................................... 70 5.2.3 The phoneme inventory and orthography of the spoken dialects HAW, GAW, ZAR, and KAND ............ 72 5.2.4 Stress in Literary Gūrānī and the spoken Gūrānī dialects ................................................................... 76 5.2.5 Syllable structure ................................................................................................................................ 80 5.3 Selected grammatical features of Literary Gūrānī and the four spoken Gūrānī dialects ................................................................................................................................ 82 5.3.1 Gender marking on nouns ................................................................................................................... 82 5.3.2 Number and case ................................................................................................................................. 83 5.3.3 Definiteness marker ............................................................................................................................ 89 5.3.4 Indefiniteness marker .......................................................................................................................... 91 5.3.5 Ezāfa particle ...................................................................................................................................... 95 5.3.6 Numerical inflection ........................................................................................................................... 98 VIII 5.3.7 Independent personal pronouns .......................................................................................................... 99 5.3.8 Tense-aspect-mood constructions ..................................................................................................... 103 5.3.9 Agentive construction in past tenses ................................................................................................. 110 5.3.10 Vocabulary .......................................................................................................................................