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Form and Meaning in Persian Vocabulary:
The
Arabic Feminine Ending
John R. Perry
Arabic loan words have played a fundamental role in the evolution of New Persian. Persian
in turn has transmitted the bulk of these loan words-together with its own modifications
and rules for their incorporation-throughout the Islamic cultural area, playing midwife at
the emergence of several Turkic and Indian literary languages.
In one class of Arabic loans, the modification of form in Persian has produced an
intriguing puzzle. Some 1500 substantives ending in the Arabic feminine marker -a have
assumed one of two forms in Persian-pronounced either with final t or with a vowel, and
written respectively with "long t" and "silent h" (e.g., hekmat
`wisdom; adage' and jomleh `total; sentence'). Is there a rationale behind this split?
In what is the first in-depth study of an old problem, the author demonstrates that the
-at/-eh split takes its cue not from Arabic (where the alternation -at/-a is purely a
matter of syntax) but from intuitive semantic categories and lexical developments in
Persian. He shows, moreover, how hundreds of -at words shifted to -eh in the course of the
past millennium, to reflect a shift in meaning; illustrates the evolution of
"doublets" such as qovvat/qovveh; and explains why -at and -eh words in Tajik,
Turkish and Urdu do not always correspond in form to their Persian cognates.
Though concerned with fundamentals of Persian lexicology and language history, this is
also a unique case study of relevance to general theories of semantics and the lexicon.
Specifications:
1991. 272pp.
Persian Studies Series, No. 12
ISBN:0-939214-67-9 (cloth): $45.00  Now
$15.00
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Form and Meaning in Persian Vocabulary
A Practical Guide To The Persian Alphabet
Grammar of Contemporary Persian
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