Зарегистрирован: 25.12.2002 Сообщения: 1448 Откуда: Минск, Беларусь
Добавлено: Пт Мар 12, 2004 8:55 pm Заголовок сообщения:
DARI, THE SPOKEN LANGUAGE OF IRANIAN ZOROASTRIANS
Ali A. Jafarey
Most of the Parsis know that the Zoroastrians in Iran, whether from Yazd or Kerman, speak among themselves a peculiar dialect, and that it is not understood by other Iranians. The general conception is that it is an artificial language devised by the Zoroastrians to preserve themselves from the dominent Muslims. It is neither artificial nor confined to Zoroastrians It is one of dialects of the central Iranian language group which stretches from Semnan, northeast of Tehran to Sivand, near Shiraz. This language is closely related to the Lari-Bandari groups, hich go further south to the Persian Gulf, from Jask in the Gulf of Oman to Lingeh, west of the Straight of Hormuz. Because none of these dialects have a written literature, their pronunciations, accents, and intonations make it a little difficult for the speakers of such a large stretch to communicate with each. They generally prefer to speak in modern Persian, the national language understood by almost all Iranians, Afghans, Tajiks, and many of the neighboring peoples.
However, Dari of the Zoroastrians in Yazad is very close to Kashani, Abyanei, Kuhpayei, Anaraki, Natanzi, and Naini, all within a radius of four hundred miles. With the exception of Dari, all other sub-dialects are spoken by Muslims, who, no doubt, are descendents of Zoroastrians. It appears that the language was spoken within a much larger area, almost to the outskirts of Tehran, but with the gradual ascendancy of Persian, it and many a dialect spoken on the Iranian Plateau lost grounds before its expansion.
The Persian language has its roots in Old Persian of the Achaemenians and Middle Persian of the Parthian and Sassanian periods. Modern Persian, in its archaic form, now called Pazand, was an international language of communication during the Sassanian period. The conquering Arab Muslim had no other way but to use it in preaching Islam in Central Asia and western China. In fact, it was through Persian that the immigrating Sufis and conquering kings spread Islam in the Indian sub-continent.
It is not known why the dialect is called "Dari," meaning royal court. In fact, standard Persian is formally called Dari, or Farsi-ye Dari, the Court Persian because of its association with the Sassanians and the succeeding Iranian kings. It is equivalent of King/Queen's English. In Afghanistan, modern Persian is called, on political grounds, only by the name of Dari to dissociate it from Persia [Fars/Pars]. Any way, it is very likely that since the Zoroastrians in Iran have been considering themselves as heirs of the royal Sassanian court, they thought it befitting to call their spoken language as Dari. It is known as "Gabri" by non-Zoroastrians.
While speakers of other Central Iranian dialects are turning more and more to Persian, the Zoroastrians, particularly those in and around Yazd, are the only people who are sustaining their dialect. They are proud of it and love to talk in it. The immigrants in Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan and other Iranian towns are coming into greater contacts with Persian speakers and see their children take more to it. Therefore, some families take special care to teach Dari to their children. Dari has a few poets, some quite popular. There is one dictionary, Farhang-e Behdinan, painstakingly compiled by [the late] Mr. Shah Jamshid Soroshian of Kerman. Kaikhosrow Keshavarz, a former President of Sazeman-e Faravahr, Young Zoroastrians Association, has written, in the monthly Faravahr a series of very useful articles on the dialect, its variations in various villages of Yazd, and a glimpse into its grammar. A few sentences of Dari have been added in the beginning of some [Iranian] Khordeh Avesta prayers.
Furthermore, there is a new feeling to preserve and promote the dialect. May be some day someone will come forward to compile a good textbook to teach and perpetuate it in a more effective and affective way. After all, it is a beautiful part of the great Iranian cultural heritage with a Zoroastrian touch.
(The Zoroastrian, The Zoroastrian Center, California Bulletin, No. 5-4, August/September 1987, Rusam Guiv Dar-e Mehr, 8952 Hazard Avenue, California, 92683 - U.S.A.)
Зарегистрирован: 25.12.2002 Сообщения: 1448 Откуда: Минск, Беларусь
Добавлено: Пт Мар 12, 2004 9:01 pm Заголовок сообщения:
Прошу прощения за некоторое несоответствие темы разделу форума (дари все же не авестийский :">), но, думается, тема интересная и данному разделу не чуждая.
Добавлено: Сб Мар 13, 2004 6:12 pm Заголовок сообщения:
Немного внесу ясность: "дари" его называют сами зороастрийцы - носители языка, остальные называют его либо "габри" либо "йезди". Здесь тот случай, когда название языка отличается от общепринятых (к примеру, самоназвание моего народа и языка - парси, хотя в литературе он обозначается как татский язык), тоже самое и с "дари" (Дари в общеизвестном смысле - персидский язык Афганистана). А зороастрийский дари относится к северо-западной группе иранских языков. По возможности постараюсь опубликовать имеющиеся у меня сведения об нем.
The Iranian Maziar Toosarvandani and Annahita Farudi recount how they traveled to Yazd, Iran, during the summer of 2003 to conduct fieldwork on the endangered language of Dari. They have subsequently founded a research organization, the Dari Language Project, to promote the preservation and perpetuation of the language.
We arrived in Yazd after a nine-hour, overnight train ride from Tehran. The relatively smooth trip, most of which we slept through in an air conditioned car, indicated how much twentieth century technology had changed rural Iran. It was easy to forget that until the 1920s the lack of modern transportation methods made regular contact between Yazd and the capital inconceivable. But as we left the train station, the vast, empty desert plane that met us reflected the shimmering early morning sunlight into our sleep-weary eyes and reminded us forcibly of why we had come.
We were retracing the path that the Zoroastrian speakers of Dari, practitioners of Iran's ancient imperial religion, had followed thousands of years before, after the seventh century Arab invasion of the Persian empire. They fled to the country's central regions in search of a haven where they could continue practicing their inherited faith and avoid the persecution by the Arab invaders, who sought to completely convert Iran's native population to Islam.
While the harsh desert climate and landscape they encountered in those desolate areas was unappealing to the Zoroastrian emigres, it was, more importantly, just as unattractive to their persecutors. Consequently, the remnants of Iran's once-majority Zoroastrian population, are confined, after a millennium of migration, to the cities of Yazd and Kerman, where today we find the only native speakers of Dari.
While the number of Iranian Zoroastrians overall (currently around 100,000) has dwindled over the past thousand years, the number of Dari speakers among them has decreased, and continues to decrease, at an even more alarming rate. As such, Dari, which, as a member of the Northwestern Iranian language family, is closely related to languages like Gilaki, Kurdish, and Balochi, less closely to Persian, and distantly to the European languages, is today the mother language of only a small portion of Iran's Zoroastrian population, numbering no more than 8,000 to 15,000 people. Because it has so few speakers, Dari is spoken in increasingly confined spheres of usage, and shows signs of converging with Farsi. Thus Dari is considered to be highly endangered.
We are particularly concerned with Dari since its endangered status is exacerbated by the fact it has not been studied adequately. While a selection of grammatical sketches exists, they are either cursory or so old that the resources are inadequate to the task of writing a comprehensive grammar of the language. It is the frightening reality that, if the last speaker were to die today and Dari were to cease to exist, we would know virtually nothing about the language.
We began planning a one-month linguistic fieldwork project last fall, a project that would take place in Iran and would have the intent of documenting and analyzing Dari in its native environment.
In order to secure financial backing for our project, without which the entire endeavor would have been impossible, we sent a proposal detailing our intention to twelve non-profit Iranian and Zoroastrian cultural organizations. The initial responses to our project were overwhelmingly positive, but monetary contributions were slow to come.
Our hopes of realizing our plans were further dampened by the political uncertainty in the Middle East, but instead of abandoning them, we redoubled our fund-raising efforts, intensifying correspondence with scholars, individuals, and organizations, and submitting our proposal to online agencies. Our perseverance proved worthwhile and by the time of our scheduled departure, we had secured enough contributions to cover the costs of our travel expenses as well as the purchase of the necessary recording equipment.
The month of July we spent living and working in Qasemabad, a Zoroastrian village within the city of Yazd. We met with our linguistic consultants, native speakers of Dari, every day, eliciting from them words and phrases and occasionally stories, which we recorded electronically. Afterwards, we transcribed the speech data manually and began preliminary analysis, often continuing far into the night.
We found an intriguing diversity in the formal properties of Dari's pronoun system despite an underlying unity of organization, and a differential treatment of subjects depending on whether the sentences in which they appear are transitive or intransitive. We are currently surveying the relevant literature to determine which features of Dari may tell us more about language generally.
Our stay in Qasemabad encompassed more than purely linguistic pursuits alone, however. We made a strong effort to participate actively in the religious and social life of the Zoroastrian community in Yazd. We integrated ourselves into the daily life of the villagers and took advantage of many unique opportunities to attend various religious ceremonies and cultural events.
While our research this summer was highly successful considering the limited amount of time we had, it only scratched the surface of Dari's structure. If nothing else, we have returned from Yazd with a realization of how much remains to be learned. We were also struck by the dire situation that the Dari language faces and by how little time is left to work with the last few elderly speakers of some dialects.
The Mohammadabad dialect, for example, possesses only a few elderly speakers, all of whom reside in Tehran. This powerful realization has inspired us to expand the scope of our research: what began as a month-long fieldwork trip will now continue through a research organization that we have founded under the name of the Dari Language Project. The Project is dedicated to preserving the Dari language through study of its linguistic structure and patterns.
Our work this summer took the first step towards a complete understanding of the language through a study of the Qasemabad dialect within the context of current linguistic theory. We plan to return during the summer of 2004 to continue our research on Qasemabad Dari, but also to expand the study to include examination of another of Dari's most threatened varieties.
By investigating the two varieties' grammars concurrently, we hope to make valid cross-dialectical comparisons as well as make further headway in analyzing the language's grammar. We will soon begin a new fundraising campaign to raise support for the Dari Language's Project's fieldwork effort next summer and to ensure its long-term success.
Though the outlook for Dari's future is grim today, much hope remains. It is a well-attested linguistic fact that attitudes towards language are of the greatest importance in determining the language's chances of revival or continued vitality in the face of imminent death.
In spite of the statistics predicting the demise of the Dari language, we believe that Dari's future is not hopeless, especially when we consider that language is intimately related to the culture and society of its speakers. For example, many argue that Dari was a local dialect that was purposely adopted by the Zoroastrians as an additional means of distinguishing themselves from their Muslim persecutors. Though this remains an unsupported claim, it seems much more likely than the alternate argument, that Dari was consciously "invented" by its speakers in order to prevent outsiders from understanding it.
Whether or not this latter view has any basis in reality or not, the fact that it is such a prevalent notion among both non-speakers and speakers is indicative of, what seems to us, Dari speakers' general interest in and awareness of their language. The Dari speakers we encountered were not only highly conscious of their language's diversity and variation but they also seemed to derive the utmost enjoyment from presenting this diversity to us in the form of words and turns-of-phrase especially different from their own speech.
While it would be preposterous to suggest that Dari is not highly threatened today, showing as it does all the typical signs of imminent death, the beauty of language, like culture, is that it is a dynamic, living system, as capable of progressing in one direction as it is in another, given the appropriate stimuli.
Indeed, the fact that, in spite of their vastly diminished numbers, the Zoroastrians have managed to preserve as much of their traditional culture as they have is quite remarkable. Their success is no doubt the result of the strength of their conviction that what they are preserving is an extremely valuable system, worthy of protection even in the face of difficulty. As linguists committed to the preservation of the Dari language, our fondest desire is therefore to convince Dari's speakers, the Zoroastrians of Iran, that their language is a complex and beautiful system equally worthy of protection.
Authors
Maziar Toosarvandani was graduated from the University of Virginia in 2003 with a B.S. in linguistics and biology. He has been accepted into the theoretical linguistics Ph.D. program at University of California at Berkeley and will attend beginning in the fall of 2004. He is currently teaching English in France.
Annahita Farudi was graduated from the University of Virginia in 2003 with a B.A. in linguistics and comparative literature. She currently attends the University of Oxford in Oxford, England where she is working towards a M.Phil. in theoretical linguistics.
[Editor's Comment: Dari became the medium of communication amongst the Iranian Zartoshties of Kerman and Yazd in the last several centuries as a means of protection and shielding themselves from those who meant them harm. Since the dialect could not be comprehended by the Moslem Iranians, the Zartoshties found an effective way of communication amongst themsleves without exposing themselves to risk. The fanatics and ruffians bent on harming the Zartoshties and the minorities, would reguarly eavesdrop and on finding out about a Zartoshty community gathering/wedding would plan attacks on the defenseless Zartoshties and inflict maximum harm.
The use of Dari diminished with the rise of Pahlavi dynasty and greater security for minorities, establishment of rule of law, and extending protection of law to all Iranians. With greater prosperity and economical opportunities increasing in the capital and other major cities, the Zartoshties of Yazd and Kerman moved to the other cities and did not have as much opportunity to communicate in Dari.
The efforts of the above researchers to do their part in preserving/documenting Dari is appreciated.
Interestingly, Jeed, the dialect spoken by the Iranian Jews of Kerman and Yazd was much closer to Dari than to the dialects spoken by Jewish community in other parts of Iran. (Mehr, Farhang. "Gavri and Jeed Dialects", ATAS-E Dorun: The Fire Within, Jamshid Soroush Soroushian Memorial volume II, 1stBooks Library, Bloomington, IN, 2003, pages 305-315)]
Зарегистрирован: 25.12.2002 Сообщения: 1448 Откуда: Минск, Беларусь
Добавлено: Вс Мар 14, 2004 11:33 am Заголовок сообщения:
Dear Friends:
We recently observed that somebody had kindly posted the article published in The Iranian on October 22 about our organization, the Dari Language Project, a research organization dedicated to the study and documentation of the Dari language.
The article gave a good overview of the origins of our project and organization, but for more details of what exactly we did in Yazd and what the Project is planning for the future, we direct you to our website at:
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