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From Old to New Persian

Utas, Bo. 2013. From Old to New Persian: Collected essays (Beiträge Zur Iranistik 38). Edited by Carina Jahani & Mehrdad Fallahzadeh. Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag.

In a long series of essays, written during almost half a century, Bo Utas analyses the development of West Iranian languages, particularly Old, Middle, and New Persian, from various perspectives. The focus is placed on the transition from Middle to New Persian and the final essays (hitherto partly unpublished) especially elucidate this process in the light of an interaction between oral and written language.
This book is the second volume of collected articles by Bo Utas. The first volume, Manuscript, Text and Literature. Collected Essays on Middle and New Persian Texts, was published on the occasion of his 70th birthday as no. 29 in the series Beiträge zur Iranistik in 2008.
The seventeen articles in the present volume cover a time span of about 2,500 years and encompass all the stages of Persian. It also contains two entirely new articles, “The Grammatical Transition from Middle to New Persian” and “Between Spoken and Written: The Formation of New Persian”, which sum up much of Bo Utas’ philological research.

For more information, see the preface to this volume and the ToC.

List of the Contents:
*The dates in brackets refer to the first edition of the articles.

  • Old Persian Miscellanea (1965–1966)
  • The Jewish-Persian Fragment from Dandān-Uiliq (1969)
  • The Jewish-Persian Fragment from Dandān-Uiliq (1975)
  • Verbs and Preverbs in the Ayyātkār ī Zarērān (1976)
  • The Pahlavi Treatise Avdēh u Sahīkēh ī Sakistān or «Wonders and Magnificence of Sistan» (1983)
  • Verbal Ideograms in the Frahang ī Pahlavīk (1984)
  • Mānistān and Xānaqāh (1985)
  • A 19th Century Inscription at Persepolis and the Swedish Physician C. G. Fager-gren (1988)
  • Traces of Evidentiality in Classical New Persian (2000)
  • Semitic in Iranian: Written, Read and Spoken Language (2005)
  • A Multiethnic Origin of New Persian (2006)
  • Gustaf Peringer and the Roots of Comparative Philology (2008)
  • Prosody: Meter and Rhyme (2009)
  • Iranian Languages as Gardens (2009)
  • The Grammatical Transition from Middle to New Persian (2013)
  • Between Spoken and Written: The Formation of New Persian (2013)

About the author:
Bo Utas is professor emeritus in Iranian languages at Uppsala University, and a scholar on Persian historical linguistics and classical Persian literature.