TURKIC-IRANIAN CONTACTS

ii. LINGUISTIC CONTACTS

Geo-historical survey. Speakers of Iranian and Turkic languages have been in contact since pre-Islamic times, notably along the Inner Asian commercial corridors known collectively as the Silk Road. Manichaean literature is found in Old Turkic, Sogdian, Parthian, and Middle Persian, while Buddhist literature of Inner Asia is extant in both Old Turkic (Uighur) and Sogdian. The early contacts between Persians on the plateau during the rule of the Sasanian king Khosraw Anushiravan (r. 539-71) and the first Türk Qaganate were diplomatic and military, and probably too short-lived to have linguistic results. With the Islamic conquest of Central Asia, and the subsequent rule of the Samanid dynasty (9th–10th centuries), Turkish slaves were imported in large numbers into the Persian-speaking realms as soldiers (golams). In Afghanistan and northern India during the 11th and 12th centuries, Turkish military slaves founded powerful dynasties, such as the Ghaznavids and the Delhi Sultans, which promoted Persian literature, though the Turkic spoken at the court remained an unwritten vernacular. In the 11th century, the incursions of the Oghuz (q.v. Ghozz) onto the Plateau and the Saljuq conquest of Iran led Turcophone nomads to settle in western Iran, and gradually Turkic languages replaced Iranian languages (Turkicization) in Azerbaijan.

It is only with the rise to dynastic power of Muslim Turcophone military elites outside Iran in eastern Turkestan, Anatolia, and Central Asia, from the 12th to the 15th centuries, that systematic convergence is seen in the evolution of court vernaculars into literary languages on the model of Persian (see below Persian literary influence on Turkic). After the Mongol invasions of the 13th century, the nomadic Turkish rank and file of the Mongol armies settled in large numbers in Iran, especially in Azerbaijan, and Turkicization accelerated (see below Turkic influence on Persian and other Iranian languages ). One tribe of these Western-Turkic speakers, the Qashqai (q.v.), later moved to Fars, where they were subject to the influence of Persian (see below Persian influence on Turkic vernaculars). There are many other Turcophone islands elsewhere in Iran, such as Afshar, Aynallu, or Kalaj (Kéral), where convergence has been little studied. Turkmen tribes, likewise speakers of a Western-Turkic or Oghuz dialect, live among the Persian-speaking population near Gorgan, adjacent to the larger Turcophone population of Turkmenistan.

In the 16th century, the Turcophone Safavid family of Ardabil in Azerbaijan, probably of Turkicized Iranian (perhaps Kurdish), origin, conquered Iran and established Turkic, the language of the court and the military, as a high-status vernacular and a widespread contact language, influencing spoken Persian, while written Persian, the language of high literature and civil administration, remained virtually unaffected in status and content. Turkic was also the mother tongue and, to an extent, the court language of the subsequent Afsharid (q.v.) and Qajar (q.v.) dynasties (see below Turkic influence on Persian and other Iranian languages).
Meanwhile in Central Asia, literary Persian was also practiced by a Turcophone ruling elite (the Uzbeks), but the high density of Uzbek settlement ousted Persian speech (of the Tajiks) from most of the Oxus and strongly influenced the remaining pockets (see below Turkic influence on Tajik).

Linguistic and social factors. The most obvious result of language contact is the borrowing, or better, copying of vocabulary by one or both of the pertinent languages. However, less obvious effects may be inferred analogically, such as changes in the sound system or syntactic structures, sometimes involving the loss, rather than the acquisition, of a feature. Syntactic convergence phenomena between Iranian and Turkic languages are all the more striking because the structures of the respective languages contrast almost in mirror image. Taking Persian to represent Iranian, since Turkic languages are more homogeneous, we may compare the following typical features of morphology: Noun Phrase (NP) and Sentence (S) syntax, and verb structure:

TABLE 1

On the other hand, there are some striking, longstanding similarities between Persian and Turkic, in contrast with other adjacent or related languages: numerals govern a singular, not a plural, noun; gender is not grammatically distinguished, even in the 3 sg. pronoun; there is no adjectival agreement; and there is a similar series of pronominal enclitics (Doerfer, 1967, pp. 57-59; Stilo, 1981, pp. 163-64). Though documentation is lacking, ancient convergence cannot be ruled out.
The following general patterns of sociolinguistic convergence are observed of Iranian and Turkic languages in contact. A language in a superordinate cultural and/or political position influences a subordinate one, often without regard to the relative population size. Thus Persian, as a high-status literary language, exerted early influences on Western Turkic of Anatolia and Azerbaijan and on Eastern Turkic of Central Asia, in their rise to literary status as Ottoman, Azeri (q.v.), and Chaghatay (q.v.), respectively, via a literate elite of the recipient language, who were not necessarily in permanent direct contact with the donors (Va‚sa‚ry). In eastern Anatolia and Azerbaijan, Turkic (the language of imperial and local rulers and their subjects) has influenced Kurdish, Tati, and local varieties of Persian chiefly in lexical loans, and by direct spoken interaction. Uzbek in the Oxus basin has under similar circumstances, and more broadly, influenced Tajik. In Fars, Persian (as the imperial, literary, and locally dominant language) has influenced Turkic, while in northern Afghanistan Dari has similarly contributed to changes in the local variety of Uzbek. Such cases of mainly vernacular convergence stem from the bilingualism of intermingled populations, and affect principally the spoken registers of the language. They are often asymmetrical: the subordinate speech community tends to become bilingual and to undergo more linguistic change than the other, though the process is always to some extent reciprocal.
Social factors appear to determine the direction of influence, rather than purely linguistic ones; for there is no hard evidence that a particular language or language type is inherently less or more suited as either a donor or a recipient (Soper, p. 412). However, some linguistic features, in combination with social or historical factors, may be more or less subject to influence than others. Thus, some varieties of Uzbek, including that which became the modern literary language, have lost phonological features typical of Turkic—the vowels /ü/ and /ö/ and vowel harmony—as a result of interaction with Persian-speaking urban communities, such as those of Bukhara and Samarqand, for which these features are nonexistent (ibid., p. 332). This loss is also observed, together with morphological and syntactic Persianisms, in spoken Uzbek of northern Afghanistan (Menges, pp. 675, 686, 693-94; Reichl, pp. 484-85). In most other respects, especially lexis and syntax, the direction of influence has been from Uzbek to Tajik. Conversely, Qashqai has not lost its characteristic Turkic vowels or vowel harmony (Soper, p. 336). Lexical borrowing, including that of lexical affixes, is the first feature chronologically, and the one universally present in language convergence. Structural morphs are least likely to be traded whereas phonological and syntactic features vary considerably in cross-linguistic availability.

Persian literary influence on Turkic. The prestige of Persian literature as a cultural-imperial cachet ensured the simultaneous expansion of spoken Turkic and written Persian wherever Turks established their power. In eastern Turkestan, ruled by a free Turcophone dynasty, the Qarakhanids (11th–12th centuries), a native Turkic literature also evolved, on Persian models but with a comparatively small Persian loan vocabulary. With the Saljuq conquest of Iran and their irruption into Anatolia after 1071, a similar process, aided by Persian immigrants such as Jalal-al-Din Rumi (1207-73; Johanson, 1993) produced a more noticeably Persianized Turkic literary language at Konya (Iconium resp. Quniya) and other centers, culminating in Ottoman Turkish from the 14th century onward, the ancestor of modern Turkish (Lewis). More than 600 Persian loanwords have been recorded in Ottoman (Stachowski), apart from several thousands of Arabic words filtered through Persian. Later, in the Timurid courts of Samarqand and Herat during the 15th and 16th centuries, a Persianized Eastern-Turkic language, Chaghatay, evolved into a forebear of modern Uzbek under the aegis of the bilingual poet and polymath Mir Ali Shir Navai (1441-1501). Persianized Azeri Turkish, never the language of a major polity, though with a flourishing literature (Va‚sa‚ry, pp. 246-48), was neglected and even actively suppressed as a written language in Iran. It was promoted as a national literary language in Soviet Azerbaijan, i.e., the present-day Republic of Azerbaijan, only from the 1920s onward. Written in a modified Cyrillic script, it shows the same regular differences from Ottoman as occur in Azeri south of the Aras, but with fewer borrowings from Persian. This is the complementary effect of Russianization of northern Azeri and of the dependence of largely vernacular southern Azeri on the Persian of its host country Iran (q.v. azerbaijan ix).
The characteristics of Persianized literary Turkic are similar in the Western- and Eastern-Turkic examples. Lexical borrowing of Persian, in particular of Perso-Arabic nouns and adjectival participles, was the staple, in semantic categories tending to the poetical, scholarly, diplomatic, and bourgeois-commercial. Particularly productive were the two stratagems, as in Persian, of creating denominal verbs: the synthetic-derivational, by suffixing a verb stem to a Persian or Perso-Arabic loanword, for example, abad-laş-maq "to flourish, become populous" (Azeri), toza-la-mak "to clean" (Uzbek); and the analytic-compositional, by supplying the loanword, often an action noun, with an auxiliary, mostly the dummy verbs meaning "to do" or "to become" (synonyms of Pers. kardan and shodan), for example, abad et-mək "to cultivate, populate" (Azeri), muvaffaq ol-maq "to succeed" (Ottoman). In elevated styles, such as Ottoman divan poetry and chancellery texts, Persian collocations such as ezafa (q.v.) phrases were included wholesale.

A common syntactic innovation was the Persian-style subordinate clause, introduced by ke or another conjunction and ending in a finite verb, which often replaced the Turkish-style preposed, nominalized verb phrase (Table 1. 4). Elegant Ottoman prose might thus read much like Persian, except for the occasional Turkic postposition or copula (Lewis; Römer), while Chaghatay generally retained more of its Turkic syntax. The Perso-Arabic orthography of loans was usually invariant, and the phonology of the recipient language was not in principle affected. Loanwords were assimilated to norms of Turkic phonotactics and vowel harmony when read aloud, (e.g., Persian Chun-ke became Ottoman /Çünkü/). The lack of vowel harmony in modern literary Uzbek (see 6) results rather from the convergence of spoken vernaculars, before this dialect of Uzbek became the basis for the written language in the 1930s. Azeri vowel qualities and vowel harmonies have also arguably been influenced by Persian, which has exerted both a literary and a vernacular influence (q.v. azerbaijan ix).

Persian influence on Turkic vernaculars. Turcophone populations in Iran and Afghanistan that are relatively isolated in the midst of the majority language, Persian or its variant Dari in Afghanistan, are affected directly via their mostly illiterate bilingual speakers, thus in ways somewhat different from the literary languages. Borrowed vocabulary is likely to be more prosaic and functionally specialized and any phonological changes are more apparent, though morphological and syntactic borrowing still tends to vary with the individual speaker or writer. Uzbek of northwestern Afghanistan has lost vowel harmony and some pronominal inflection, but has retained serial verbs. In addition to preposed relative and adverbial phrases, speakers make extensive use of postposed finite-verb clauses introduced by ki (e.g., majbur boldilar ki malumat bersələr ki... "they were obliged to make known that..."). The subjunctive sense of verbs in such purpose clauses is expressed by the Turkic suffixes of the conditional -san or the imperative-optative -kin (Menges, pp. 686, 689-90, 693; Reichl, pp. 485-86).

Qashqai, a Turkic island in the Persian-speaking province of Fars for some centuries, has on the contrary retained its characteristic vowels and vowel harmony, but lost the feature of serial verbs. Its verbal system, while not borrowing actual Persian morphs, has also come to resemble that of Persian; e.g., the verb issə- "to want" functions as a future auxiliary, like Persian xvah-: iss-iyr qar yag-a "it will snow." Whereas the main verb in Persian takes the form of the short infinitive, that of Qashqai is in the subjunctive (formerly called conditional), as in the Persian volitional construction. Other structural borrowings from Persian include the comparative and superlative suffixes—sowug-tər "colder"; böyüg-tərin "biggest, eldest"— (Soper, pp. 405-07, 419) and both prepositional phrases—be-nam-e—and calques using Turkic postpositions—bu surat-ta "in this case"—(Csato‚, pp. 271). Sonqor, a Turkic island near Kermanshah, has apparently accepted Persian syntactic and morphological features, such as comparative -tar (cf. Qashqai) and indefinite -i, while exchanging phonological features with the local Kurdish (Bulut, pp. 241, 253-54, 266). Persian influence extends to modal constructions in Azeri and Khalaj (Kéral).

Turkic influence on Persian and other Iranian languages. Scores of everyday Azeri words attest to solid Turkic influence on the lexicon of standard Persian, spoken and written. Typical are otaq "room," ojaq "fireplace," otu "smoothing iron," qeychi "scissors," qachaq "contraband," qadagan "prohibited" (orig. noun "command"), tutun "tobacco," and tup "ball." The Turkic lexical suffix -Chi was used independently of Turkic lexical models and vowel harmony to coin Persian agentives: shekar-chi "hunter," taqlid-chi "mimic," post-chi "postman" (via French; cf. Republican Turkish posta-cı via Italian), tutun-chi "tobacconist" (cf. Republican Turkish tütün-cü, Azeri tütün-çü). The semantic domains of this vocabulary include the pastoral, domestic, military, technological, and commercial—all testifying to the effects of interaction at the spoken, vernacular, practical day-to-day level of intermingled and bilingual populations. Where Turkic loans have Persian synonyms, it is often possible to range the two in contrasting social registers, of which the Persian or Perso-Arabic is the more formal, literary, or refined in connotation, and the Turkic or Turco-Mongol the more informal, prosaic, or vernacular:

TABLE 2

Of the thousands of loanwords from Turkic of all periods listed in Gerhard Doerfer's works, about 1,200 of which he designates Azeri (q.v. azerbaijan viii, in EIr III, p. 246), many, perhaps most, are ephemeral military and administrative terms, such as dostaq "captive" (metathesized from dut-saq) and sáong (?) "confiscation" (sáong kardan "to confiscate"), taken from classical Persian histories. Together with the Turkic words and phrases occasionally inserted into Persian poetry (Gandjei, 1986), these phenomena attest to the continuing symbiosis of Turks and Persians in the realms of politics and popular culture, but do not help to document the modern corpus of Turkic in Persian.

Some cultic terms stemming from the Safavid establishment of Shiism are of Turkic provenance. These include not only the Turco-Mongol tug, a battle standard nowadays serving as a Moháarram processional standard, but also the originally Arabic tazie "Moháarram passion play," which reveals its Azeri Turkish provenance by the loss of final t (Perry, 2001, p. 198). While the Safavid shahs promoted written Persian as the established language of bureaucracy and literature, the fact that they and their Qizilbash officers habitually spoke Turkic in court and camp lent this vernacular an unprecedented prestige in Iran. Turkic expanded its domains of usage, and competed with Persian as a badge of ethnic and social identity. Chronicles repeatedly testify to the perceived functional specialization of Turks and Tajiks (the contrastive term for Persian-speakers) as xan and mirza, "Man of the Sword" and "Man of the Pen," respectively, and to their rivalry for status and power in the imperial structure. Foreign visitors, such as John Chardin (1643- ca. 1713, q.v.), Adam Olearius (1603-71), and Pietro della Valle (1586-1652), noted that spoken Turkic was so common among all classes in Iran as to be the lingua franca. Upwardly mobile Iranians, according to Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716), actively learned Turkic: "From the court it spread to the leading families of the Persians to such an extent that it is now almost shameful in Persia for a man of distinction to be ignorant of Turkish" (Gandjei, 1986, pp. 311-13, 315). Many of the words and phrases in the Persian glossary by Sir Thomas Herbert (1606-82, q.v.) are pure Turkic, even the personal pronouns "Man San O 'I Thou He'" (Perry, 1996, pp. 275, 277). The prestige of Turkic did not long survive the dynasty, but linguistic influence continued in Qajar times, when Turks gravitated to the new capital, Tehran, seeking work and patronage.

A subtle and lasting relic of Turkic in Persian is seen in Persian noun phrases that are actually Turkic in syntax (Table 1. 2). Instead of the right-branching construction with modifier following noun—e.g., bab-e ali "lofty portal": lexically Arabic, contextually Ottoman, but syntactically Persian—their word order is reversed, with modifier preceding noun—e.g., ali qapu "lofty portal": lexically Arabic and Turkic, contextually Persian, but syntactically Turkic. Several culinary collocations, such as sabzi polow "vegetable rice" and barre kabab "grilled lamb," are of this Turkic left-branching type, while the alternative kabab-e barre is of the Persian type (Perry, 1990, pp. 226-27).

More significant sociologically are onomastic phrases in contrasting Turkic and Persian syntax. The reversal of word order in royal titulature from the type with a preposed title (e.g., Shah Esmail, Shah Abbas) to the type with a postposed title (e.g., Nader Shah, Reza Shah), which has been standard in Iran since the end of the Safavid dynasty, is simply the belated and unconscious adoption of Turkic syntax, that is: modifier before head (e.g., Mehmet aqa, Ali qoli xan), in what had previously been a Persian noun phrase, that is: head before modifier (e.g., xúaja Hafez). Even earlier, from Timurid times onward, the etymologically Persian title mirza was postposed to designate a prince of the ruling Turkish house, whether Safavid or Qajar (e.g., Tahmasb Mirza, Iraj Mirza), imitating the postposing of Turkic titles such as xan and aqa. In reaction, mirza preposed in accordance with Persian syntax came to designate a bureaucrat or writer, while the devalued titles shah and mir were preposed in the titulature of Sufi leaders (e.g., Shah Mir Hamza, Mir Haydar) since Iranians retained cultural and quasi-political prominence in these social niches (Perry, 1990, pp. 218-23; 2003, pp. 118-23). Until today, the formal onomastic phrase (aqa-ye or xanom-e Tehrani) is of Persian type, while the informal one (Rostam aqa, Ûale xanom) is syntactically Turkic (Table 1. 2).

Persian and other Iranian languages in Iran do not seem to have been strongly affected by Turkic phonology. It has been argued that the collapse of /q/ with /g/, which resulted in the identical pronunciation of qaf and gayn in most of western Iran today, was influenced by Turkic (Pisowicz, pp. 112-4). It is likewise hard to demonstrate systematic Turkic influence on Persian sentence syntax or the verbal system, though it has been suggested that the use of the perfect tenses (rafte-ast, mi-rafte-ast, rafte bude-ast) in an evidential or noncommittal mode is of Turkic inspiration (Soper, pp. 356-57). Turkicism is most probably no longer a productive feature of Standard Persian, though selective Turkicization continues in local areas of Iranian speech in western Iran.

The Iranian languages other than Persian that are most strongly subject to Turkic influence are Kurdish (Bulut) and some dialects of Tati and Talyshi in Azerbaijan. It has been argued that the verb systems of the latter two have been changing from an Iranian to a more Turkic type (Stilo, 1981; Windfuhr, 1987).

Turkic influence on Tajik. Since the 16th century, the Persian dialects of the regions where Tajiks and Uzbeks intermingled, especially Bukhara and Samarqand and the Farghana and Zarafshan valleys, came increasingly under the influence of Uzbek(q.v. central asia xiv, in EIr V, pp. 226-35; Soper, pp. 82-104, 277-329, 409; Windfuhr, forthcoming). In addition to lexical borrowings from Uzbek, Tajik adopted function words, such as the interrogative particle mi, which follows the component questioned (Table 1. 7), a series of indefinite pronouns formed with the interrogative pronoun kim- (e. g., kim-kujo "somewhere or other"), and postpositions, both Uzbek originals (e.g., –dan "from"), and Persian prepositions used analogically after their nouns (e. g., bozor-ba "to the market").
Turkic syntactic structures, especially those involving non-finite verb forms, were imitated with Persian morphs, for example, in styles of reporting speech: kud-i u kist? gufta man pursidam "'Who is he, exactly?' I asked" (lit., "saying, I asked")(cf. Uzbek use of deb from demak "to say"). A figurative extension of this construction is used in Turkic languages to express a purpose or result clause, such as, har otish-ra ajinna gufta me-tarsidam "I thought every fire was a jinn, and was scared" (lit. "Having called every fire a jinn, I became scared"). Other examples are the nominalization of sentential complements through infinitives (e. g., mo kujo raftan-e xud-ro me-donem "we know where we are going") and nominalization of relative clauses by means of substantivized participles (e. g., dar xona budagi-ho heCh na-dida budand "those who were in the house saw nothing"). Other analogical uses of the Persian past participial form in the manner of a Turkic non-finite form are the dependent verb of tavonistan "to be able" (e. g., rafta me-tavonam "I can go") and especially conjunct or serial verb constructions, of which 17 types have been recorded (e.g., self-benefactive is navishta giriftam "I copied down") (q.v. central asia xiv, p. 232 is a list of Uzbek-Tajik correspondences).

This analogical expansion of the verb system is the most pervasive result of Uzbek influence on Tajik. Other facets are an expanded and productive repertory of denominal and causative verbs (e.g., mukofot-on-idan "to requite, reward," which is derived from a borrowed Arabic action noun) and, arguably, an evidential mode that uses the present, progressive, and past perfect tenses (e.g., nagz jo-e buda-ast "[I'm sure] it's a nice place" or "it's supposed to be a nice place").

All of these features were incorporated to varying degrees by Soviet writers in Modern Literary Tajik, the approved style of the language from the 1930s until the later 1980s. But several features are already proving to be ephemeral, as they are no longer actively imitated by younger writers. Some extreme Uzbekisms were never emulated in literature, though they are still features of Northern Tajik speech, such are Turkic personal inflections on verbs, as in xondagi-man "I've read [it]" (cf. literary Tajik xonda-am) and Turkic-style possessive noun phrases with -ro, for example, muallim-a kitob-ash (cf. muallim-ro) for "the teacher's book" (cf. Uzbek muallim-ning kitob-i replacing the Persian ezafa construction).

Bibliography: Christiane Bulut, "Iranian Influences in Sonqor Turkic," in É. A´. Csato‚, Linguistic Convergence, pp. 241-69. Éva A´. Csato‚, "Copying in Kashkay," in É. A´. Csato‚, Linguistic Convergence, pp. 275-83. É. A´. Csato‚, B. Isaksson, and C. Jahani, eds., Linguistic Convergence and Areal Diffusion: Case Studies from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic, London, 2005. Gerhard Doerfer, Türkische Lehnwörter im Tadschikischen, Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 37/3, Wiesbaden, 1967. Idem, "Azerbaijan viii: Azeri (AÚdòar^) Turkish," in EIr III, pp. 245-48. Idem, "Central Asia xiv. Turkish-Iranian Language Contacts," in EIr V, pp. 226-35. Tourkhan Gandjei, "Turkish in Pre-Mongol Persian Poetry," BSOAS 49, 1986, pp. 67-76. Idem, "Turkish in the Safavid Court of Isfahan," in Me‚langes offerts aà Ireàne Me‚likoff, Turcica 21-23, Louvain, 1991, pp. 311-318. Lars Johanson, "Azerbaijan ix: Iranian Elements in Azeri Turkish," in EIr III, pp. 248-51. Idem, "Rum^ and the Birth of Turkish Poetry," Journal of Turkology 1/1, 1993, pp. 23-37. Idem, "Bilateral Code Copying in Eastern Persian and South-Eastern Turkic," in É. A´. Csato‚, Linguistic Convergence, pp. 205-14. Filiz Kéral, "Modal Constructions in Turkic of Iran," in É. A´. Csato‚, Linguistic Convergence, pp. 285-93. Geoffrey Lewis, "The Strange Case of Ottoman," in É. A´. Csato‚, Linguistic Convergence, pp. 295-304. Manfred Lorentz, "Die partizipialen Wendungen—ein Unterscheidungsmerkmal des Tag¡ikischen gegenüber dem Persischen," Mitteilungen des Instituts für Orientforschung 10, 1964, pp. 133-39. Karl Menges, "Zum Özbekischen von Nord-Afghanistan," Anthropos 41-44,1946-49, pp. 673-710. John R. Perry, "Uzbek Influence on Tajik Syntax: The Converb Constructions," in Paul R. Clyne, William F. Hanks, and Carol L. Hofbauer, eds., The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels, Chicago, 1979, pp. 448-61. Idem, "Mirza, Mashti and Juja Kabab: Some Cases of Anomalous Noun Phrase Word Order in Persian," in Charles P. Melville, ed., Persian and Islamic Studies in Honour of P. W. Avery, Pembroke Papers 1, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 213-28. Idem, "Persian during the Safavid Period: Sketch for an État de Langue," in Charles P. Melville, ed., Safavid Persia: The History and Politics of an Islamic Society, Pembroke Papers 4, London, 1996, pp. 269-83. Idem, "The Historical Role of Turkish in Relation to the Persian of Iran," Iran & Caucasus 5, 2001, pp. 193-200. Idem, "Ethno-Linguistic Markers of the Turco-Mongol Military and Persian Bureaucratic Castes in Pre-Modern Iran and India," in Irene Schneider, ed. Militər und Staatlichkeit, Mitteilungen des Sonderforschungsbereiches "Differenz und Integration" 5,Halle-Wittenberg, 2003, pp. 111-25. Andrzej Pisowicz, Origins of the New and Middle Persian Phonological Systems, Cracow, 1985. Karl Reichl, "Syntactic Interference in Afghan Uzbek," Anthropos 78, 1983, pp. 481-500. Claudia Römer, "Right-Branching vs. Left-Branching Subordinate Clauses in 16th Century Ottoman Historical Texts: Haphazard Use or Stylistic Device?" in É. A´. Csato‚, Linguistic Convergence, pp. 317-33. John D. Soper, Loan Syntax in Turkic and Iranian, ed. Andra‚s J. E. Bodrogligeti, Bloomington, IN, 1996. Stanislaw Stachowski, "Studien über die neupersischen Lehnwörter im Osmanisch-türkischen," Folia Orientalia 14, 1972-73, pp. 77-118 (part I); 15, 1974, pp. 87-118 (part II); 16, 1975, pp. 145-92 (part III); 17, 1976, pp. 141-73 (part IV); 18, 1977, pp. 87-118 (part V); and 19, 1978, pp. 93-126 (part VI); a few etymologies have been rejected or remain dubious, but the first part contains a useful bibliography, referring also to studies of Arabic loanwords borrowed via Persian. Donald L. Stilo, "The Tati Language Group in the Sociolinguistic Context of Northwestern Iran and Transcaucasia," Iranian Studies 14, 1981, pp. 137-87. Idem, "Iranian as Buffer Zone between the Universal Typologies of Turkic and Semitic," in É. A´. Csato‚, Linguistic Convergence, pp. 35-63. Istva‚n Va‚sa‚ry, "The Beginnings of Western Turkic Literacy in Anatolia and Iran (13th–14th Centuries)," in Éva M. Jeremia‚s, ed., Irano-Turkic Cultural Contacts in the 11th–17th Centuries, Budapest, 2003, pp. 245-53. Gernot L. Windfuhr, "Convergence: Iranian Talyshi and Turkic Azeri," in Elena Bashir, Madhav M. Deshpande, and Peter E. Hook, eds., Select Papers from South Asian Languages Analysis 7: Roundtable Conference Held in Ann Arbor, Mich., May 17–19, 1985, Bloomington, IN, 1987, pp. 385-406. Idem, "Moods, or Degrees of Reality? Competing Categorical Vectors in Irano-Turkic Convergence. Tat Persian and Azerbaijani, Tajik Persian and Uzbek," in Lars Johanson, Christiane Bulut, and Filiz Kiral, eds., Studies on Turkic-Iranian Contiguity, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, forthcoming.

(John R. Perry)

January 24, 2006


John R. Perry
Professor of Persian Office:
Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Pick Hall 221
5828 South University Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637
(773)702-7251
Ph.D., Cambridge University, 1970.
Teaching at Chicago since 1972.
Email: j-perry@uchicago.edu

SPECIAL INTERESTS: Persian Linguistics and Language History, Cultural History of Iran and the Middle East.

John R. Perry
Professor of Persian
John Perry was born in Britain and educated at Cambridge University (Pembroke College), where in 1970 he was awarded a Ph.D in Oriental Studies (Arabic and Persian). During summer vacations he hitchhiked to Egypt and to Iran, and in 1964-65 spent a year studying Persian at Tehran University. He has conducted research in Iran, Iraq (including Kurdistan), Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Tajikistan, and traveled the Karakoram Highway to Kashgar. He taught in the Arabic Studies Department at St. Andrews University, Scotland (1968 - 1972) before coming to Chicago. His teaching at Chicago has included courses on Middle Eastern literature in translation and Islamic Civilization as well as Persian (and Tajik) language and literature.
His earlier research focused on the history of eighteenth-century Iran and adjacent regions. He concentrates currently on the history of the Persian language, and in particular the mechanisms of the incorporation of Arabic vocabulary into Persian and its dissemination into other languages of the region. Other interests include Iranian folklore and vernacular culture, and the language and cultural history of Tajikistan.
Selected Publications
Monographs:
• Karim Khan Zand, A History of Iran 1747-1779. University of Chicago Press, 1979.
This work was translated into Persian ( Tehran, 1986) and into Kurdish (Sulaymani, 2005); a shorter, popular version has been published in Oneworld’s “Makers of the Muslim World” Series (Karim Khan Zand, Oxford, 2006).
• Form and Meaning in Persian Vocabulary: The Arabic Feminine Ending . Bibliotheca Persica Persian Studies Series No. 12. Mazda Publishers: Costa Mesa, CA, 1991.
• A Tajik Persian Reference Grammar. Leiden: Brill, 2005..
Edition and Translation:
• Mikhail Naimy [Nu‘ayma], A New Year: Stories, Autobiography and Poems, selected and translated by J. R. Perry (Arabic Translation Series of the Journal of Arabic Literature, No. 3). Leiden: Brill, 1974.
• “Tajik Literature: Seventy Years is Longer Than the Millennium.” Introductory essay, translations of a critical essay by Askar Hakim, and two poems by Gulrukhsor; editing of translations of stories and poems by Perry’s students, in World Literature Today: Literatures of Central Asia 70/3 (Summer 1996), pp. 571-88.
• “Ashura at Skardu.” Field videotape of Muharram procession in northern Pakistan, edited for distribution with 4-page study guide (26 minutes), 1996.
• The Sands of Oxus: Boyhood Reminiscences of Sadriddin Aini . Annotated translation from Tajik, jointly with R. Lehr. Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 1998.
• Asian Folklore Studies: Folklore of the Iranian Region . Vol. 60/2 (2001). Guest editor, John R. Perry. Nanzan University, Nagoya, Japan,
Articles:
• “The Last Safavids, 1722-1773.” Iran (JBIPS) XI (1971), pp. 59-69.
• “Forced Migration in Iran during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” Iranian Studies 8/4 (1975), pp. 199-215.
• “Justice for the Underprivileged: The Ombudsman Tradition of Iran.” JNES 37/3 (1978), pp. 203-15.
• “Differential Assimilation of some Arabic Loanwords in Tajik and Uzbek.” Folia Slavica Vol. 7/1-2 (1984), pp. 268-82.
• “Language Reform in Turkey and Iran.” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 17 (1985), pp. 295-311.
• “Blackmailing Amazons and Dutch Pigs: A Consideration of Epic and Folktale Motifs in Persian Historiography.” Iranian Studies 19/2 (1986), pp. 155-65.
• “Mirza, Mashti and Juja Kabab: Some Cases of Anomalous Noun Phrase Word Order in Persian.” Pembroke Persian Papers, 1: Persian and Islamic Studies in honour of P.W. Avery. Ed. Charles Melville (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 213-28.
• “Early Arabic-Persian Lexicography: The asâmî and masâdir Genres.” Proceedings of the Colloquium on Arabic Lexicology and Lexicography (C.A.L.L.), Part I, ed. K. Dévenyi, T. Iványi, A. Shivtiel (Budapest, 1993), pp. 247-60.
• “Lexical doublets as a derivational device in Persian: The Arabic feminine ending.” Acta Orient. Hung. XLVIII (1995), pp. 127-53.
• “Persian during the Safavid Period: Sketch for an Etat de Langue .” Safavid Persia: The History and Politics of an Islamic Society, ed. Charles Melville (London & New York: I. B. Tauris, 1996), pp. 269-83.
• “From Persian to Tajik to Persian: Culture, politics and law reshape a Central Asian language.” NSL.8. Linguistic Studies in the Non-Slavic Languages of the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Baltic Republics, Ed. Howard I. Aronson (University of Chicago, 1996), pp. 279-305.
• “Script and Scripture: The Three Alphabets of Tajik Persian, 1927-1997.” Journal of Central Asian Studies II/1 (1997), pp. 2-18.
• “Comparative Perspectives on Language Planning in Iran and Tajikistan,” Language and Society in the Middle East and North Africa: Studies in Variation and Identity, ed. Yasir Suleiman (London: Curzon, 1999). pp. 154-74.
• “Toward a Theory of Urban Moieties: The Haydariyya and Ni‘matiyya Revisited.” Iranian Studies 32/1 (1999), pp. 51-70.
• “‘Epistemic’ verb forms in Persian of Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan.” Evidentials: Turkic, Iranian and Neighboring Languages, ed. Lars Johanson and Bo Utas (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000), pp. 229-57.
• “Monty Python and the Mathnavi: The Parrot in Persian, Indian and English humor,” Iranian Studies 36/1 (2003), 63-73.
Numerous entries contributed to reference works, inc. The Encyclopedia of Islam, Encyclopaedia Iranica, Encyclopaedia of Asian History, Handbuch der Lexicographie, The Cambridge History of Iran, The UNESCO History of the Scientific & Cultural Development of Mankind, Facts about the World’s Languages, The Supplement to the Modern Encyclopedia of Russian, Soviet, and Eurasian History (SMERSH); and over 50 book and media reviews.