Document Type : Research article
Authors
Department of Persian Language and Literature, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Tabriz University, Tabriz, Iran
Abstract
Highlights
Extended Abstract
Introduction
Manuscripts are among the most valuable national and cultural assets of any country, and editing and refining them is the first step in the advancement of Persian literature. One of these ancient written works is the handwritten commentaries on NezamiGanjavi's "Sharafnâme," written by various commentators based on their different perspectives and scientific knowledge. These commentators aimed to clarify the complexities of "Sharafnâme" and to help readers understand and appreciate it better. They sought not only to eliminate ambiguities but also to gain insight into the poet's personal experiences and to access the emotional memory of subsequent poets. They provided various literary, social, cultural, and historical information according to the level, taste, and knowledge of their audience. These handwritten commentaries were helpful to many Persian literature enthusiasts at the time of their creation and remain influential and significant today.
Literature Review and Methodology
While limited research has been conducted on the printed commentaries of "Sharafnâme," such as the study by GholamhosseinGholamhossein-Zadeh and his colleagues (2008), who compared the commentaries of Servatiyân, VahidDastgerdi, Zanjâni, and Abdul Hamidi in three domains: vocabulary, phrases, and entire verses, no research has yet been conducted on comparing and analyzing the old handwritten commentaries of "Sharafnâme" from linguistic, stylistic, and other perspectives.
In this article, four commentaries were selected from among 250 handwritten versions of "Sharafnâme" (Eskandarnâme). The authors first studied the texts of Khan Arzu and Sufyâni's commentaries, as well as two anonymous commentaries, considering the subject of the article. They collected both explicit and implicit content and quantitative and qualitative data using cumulative library research methods. Then, by objectively comparing them, they identified the common linguistic and stylistic features and the differences of each, presenting some of the countable data in frequency tables for better conclusions.
Discussion
Linguistic features are one of the components that determine a poet's or writer's style. In the books of commentary on literary texts, with specific methods and various features, the thoughts of poets and writers are expressed. The characteristics of the handwritten commentaries of "Sharafnâme" are somewhat similar due to the same temporal and spatial context. Most of these commentaries were written from the 10th to the 13th centuries, featuring simple prose, albeit somewhat evolved despite their flaws. Additionally, the authors of these works, considering the scientific nature of prose, did not engage in artistic elaboration in their writing. Therefore, the article's authors, after analyzing the collected data, focused only on linguistic features at the phonetic, morphological, and grammatical levels, providing examples and evaluating their styles.
Conclusion
The results of this study, after a brief introduction to the handwritten commentaries of "Sharafnâme" as scientific-literary texts, indicate that all the commentators from the Indian subcontinent had a good command of Persian and conveyed meanings and concepts with simple, understandable, clear, and explicit words and sentences, consistent with the standard language of India and even Iran at that time. In these commentaries, simplicity in writing, variety, and novelty in word choice, including Turkish, Hindi, and other words based on sources, the creation of semantic networks, and the use of simple and complex word structures and natural yet ancient orthography are evident. They also utilized local words, literary and scientific terms, Quranic verses, and Arabic expressions while avoiding verbosity and redundant words. Furthermore, the handwritten commentaries include features like additional and descriptive syntactic combinations, Arabic expressions, superlatives, and simple and ancient letters, nouns, and verbs, which detract from their uniformity.Therefore, their style, in terms of vocabulary and morphology, aligns more with the characteristics of the prose of the Ghaznavid and Seljuk periods (intermediate), reflecting their scientific prose nature.
Keywords:
Linguistic features - Manuscripts descriptions - Sharafnameh - NezamiGanjavi
Keywords
Main Subjects
)