A Persian Sufi Poem: Vocabulary and Terminology
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: PERSIA Volume 1 A PERSIAN SUFI POEM: VOCABULARY AND TERMINOLOGY A PERSIAN SUFI POEM: VOCABULARY AND TERMINOLOGY Concordance, frequency word-list, statistical survey, Arabic loan-words and Sufi-religious - - terminology in T.ar1q ut-tah. q1q (A.H. 744) BO UTAS First published in 1978 by Curzon Press Ltd This edition first published in 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1977 Bo Utas All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-138-05482-0 (Set) ISBN: 978-1-315-11348-7 (Set) (ebk) ISBN: 978-1-138-05884-2 (Volume 1) (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-16390-1 (Volume 1) (ebk) Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace. SCANDINAVIAN INSTITUTE OF N036 ASIAN STUDIES MONOGRAPH SERIES A Persian Sufi Poem: Vocabulary and Terminology Concordance, frequency word-list, statistical survey, Arabic loan-words and Sufi-religious terminology in Tariq ut-tai:Jqlq (A.H. 744) Bo Utas Curzon Press Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies Kejsergade 2, DK-1155 Copenhagen K First published 1978 Curzon Press Ltd: London and Malmo © Bo Utas 1977 ISBN 0 7007 0016 8 ISSN 0069 1712 This book was printed with the aid of a grant from the Swedish Statens Humanistiska Forskningsrad. The manuscript was prepared for publication by Mrs. Leana Omeri Hoskuldsson. Printed in Sweden Wallin & Dalholm, Lund TABLE OF CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION A. General questions and presentation of previous studies 1-8 B. The investigated text 8-9 C. The preparation of the concordance 10-14 D. The plan of the work 14-15 E. Alphabetical order, system of transcription, abbreviations, etc. 16-17 II . CONCORDANCE 18-74 III. FREQUENCY WORD-LIST 75-102 IV. STATISTICAL SURVEY OF THE GENERAL VOCABULARY A. Preliminaries 103-104 B. Rank, frequency and cumulated shares of vocabulary and occurrences (Table 1) 104-110 C. The relation vocabulary/occurences (F igure 1) 111-113 D. The relation rank/frequency represented in bilogarithmic coordinates (Figures 2-3) 113-118 E. Conclusions 118-119 V. THE ARABIC LOAN-WORD VOCABULARY A. Definition of Arabic loan-words 120-121 B. Rank, frequency and cumulated shares of Arabic vocabulary and occurrences (Table 2) 121-123 c. Comparison with results of previous word-counts (Figure 4) 123-129 D. Rank/frequency of Arabic loan-words represent ed in bilogarithmic coordinates (Figure 5) 130-133 E. Conclusions 133-134 VI. THE SUFI-RELIGIOUS VOCABULARY A. Definition of Sufi-religious terms 135-141 B. List of Sufi-religious terms 142-188 c. The Sufi-religious terminology in relation to the Arabic loan-word vocabulary (Table 3) 189-193 D. The character and structure of the Sufi religious terminology 194-206 E. Terminology and poetical form 207-209 VII. BIBLIOGRAPHY 210-214 APPENDIX : Critical text of !ariq ut-ta?qiq Ol- I ERRATA p. 3 l. 10: add Acad. before Scient. p. 111 n. 1 l. 3: that should be than p. 120 l. 17 : if should be is p. 124 last line of table column 4 and 5: (8,83) should change place with (2.39) p. 125 two last lines of the table 2nd column: (8.83) should change place with (2.39) p. 134 l. 10: Sâhnâmah should have a “hook” on top of the S p. 210 Frumkina: Statisticeskie.... I, INTRODUCTION A. GENERAL QUESTIONS AND PRESENTATION OF PREVIOUS STUDIES The statistical treatment of the lexicon of New Persian is only in its infancy. Such investigations, at least as far as they consist of long word-lists, frequencies, tables and graphs, may seem superficial and meaningless to philologists who are ac cus:tomed to work with more comprehensive methods. Those methods, however, must in many cases be considered as combinations of many factors, including appreciations of frequencies and frag mentary contextual concordances, forming part of the general linguistic competence of the investigator. Without doubt such factors, if only intuitivelr, always play an important role in philological work. It therefore seems a worth-while task to isolate some of thes.e factors in order to describe them in a more complete and quantitative way. The lexicon, and special vocabularies within it, are ob vious objects for quantitative, i.e. statistical, investigations. This book will give a general survey of the vocabulary of a Classical Persian poem as well as a presentation of two special vocabularies within the general vocabulary: Arabic loan-words and Sufi-religious terminology. It will also describe some of the connections between these two special vocabularies. The investigation is not without precedents. Especially, the Arabic element in New Persian has attracted attention. A well-known and often discussed phenomenon through th-e whole history of Persian studies, it seems that the first strictly quantitative study -on the subject is the article "Statistik und Semantik der arabischen Lehnworter in der Sprache 0 Alawl's" by Reiner Koppe in 1960. 1 Using statistical methods developed and described by G. U. Yule2 and G. Herdan, 3 Koppe gives a statis- 1 wissensahaftZiahe Zeitsahrift der HumboZdt-Universitat zu Bertin, gese11schafts- u. sprachwiss. Reihe, 9(1959/60) : 5, 585- 619. 2The statistiaaZ study of Ziterary voaabuZary, Cambridge 1944. 3Language as ahoiae and ahanae, Groningen 1956. tical survey of the proportions of (1) words of Arabic origin, (2) words of Persian origin, and (3) European loan-words in two substantial samples (in all 28,061 word-occurrences) from two books by the well-known contemporary author and iranist Buzurg ~Alavi. Together with this investigation, Koppe presents a se mantic study of the Arabic part of the vocabulary of these samples, organizing it in groups of meaning according to the system used by F. Dornseiff in the work Der deutsche Wortschatz nach Sachgruppen (4. Aufl., 1954), A year later Wojciech Skalmowski published an article en titled "Ein Beitrag zur Statistik der arabischen Lehnworter im Neupersischen", 1 supplementing Koppe's results with figures for the proportions of Arabic loan-words in four samples from gha zals of the Classical Persian poets sa~di and ~afi~ (in all 8,122 word-occurrences). In his article Skalmowski applies the Chi-square test2 in order to establish the probability of chance fluctuations between the samples. Referring to B. Mandel brot, 3 he also calculates the so called "text tempera.ture" (sup posed to characterize the frequency distribution of the words within the vocabulary) both for Koppe's and his own statistical results. His conclusion is that ~Alavi's use of Arabic loan words on the whole agrees with that .found in the language of the classical texts. The work of Koppe and Skalmowski was taken up and continued by Gilbert Lazard who, in 1965, published his article "Les em prunts arabes dans la prose persane du Xe au XIIe siecle: aper <;:u statistique". 4 Lazard points to a number of difficulties in comparing the results of Koppe on ~Alavi with those of Skal mowski on Sa~di and ~afi~, emanating especially from differences in length of the samples. Then he presents the results of an in vestigation of his own, made along the same lines, on eight samples from early New Persian prose works (in all 18,367 word- 1FoUa Orien·taUa 3(1961):1..:2, 171-175. 2Referring to Herdan, op.cit., 88 ff. 3 r.a. ''Structure formelle des textes et communication''~ Word 10(1954), 1-27. 4Rev. de Z'EcoZe Nat. des Zangues orientaLes vivantes, 2(1965), 53-67. 2 occurrences). Lazard, too, uses the Chi-square test, but he ex presses his doubt (p. 58, n. 1) as to the value of the calcu lation of the "text temperature" ("temperature informationelle") as a description of the frequency distribution within the voca bulary.1 He comes to definite conclusions concerning the grow ing proportion of Arabic loan-words in Persian prose from the lOth to the 12th century, and this development is also pre sented in graphical form . The results of Skalmowski and Lazard were commented upon by Zsigmund Telegdi in an article in Acta Linguistica Scient . Hung .2 entitled "Remarques sur les emprunts arabes en persan". Telegdi takes as his starting-point the phenomenon called "di glossia" (i.e. here of Persian as the popular spoken language coexisting with Arabic as the learned written language) and gives as an example the introduction of Arabic infinitives (etc.) in Persian so called "compound verbs" . He does not, how ever, present statistical material or fixed chro nologies. In his book Le vocabuZaire arabe dans Ze Livr e des Rois de Firdau s i, etude phiZoZogique et de statistique Zinguistique (Wiesbaden 1970, diss.), M. Djafar MoYnfa r approaches the ques tion of the Arabic loan-words with a more comprehensive method. Criticizing (p. XI) his predecessors, especia lly Koppe, for lack of precision in their work and f o r i nade quate samp l ing , he presents complete lists of Arabic loan-wor d s i n t h e e x tensi ve lOth century national epic ~;hnama h (based o n Wo lff 's GZossar).