The extinct language of Gurgan: its sources and origins.

• Author: Borjian, Habib
• Position: Report

One of the poorly studied Iranian languages is Gurgani, the extinct language of Gurgan, the Persian province at the southeastern corner of the Caspian Sea. Gurgan is situated north of the Alburz watershed and consists of the broad plains and valleys watered by the rivers Gurgan and Atrak. Throughout history, the provincial capital of Gurgan was the city of Gurgan; under the Safavids, however, the southwestern town of Astarabad gained prominence, and the province itself was constituted as that of Astarabad. The town of Astarabad was renamed Gurgan under Reza Shah Pahlavi, while the old town of Gurgan corresponds to the site of the present Gunbad-i Qabus. Dast-i Gurgan is now designated as "Turkmen Sahara" on the map, and, just to add to the confusion, the province itself has recently been renamed Gulistan "rose garden," apparently after the trend in the Islamic Republic to replace toponyms that sound pagan, in this case gurgan "wolves."

The only known extant documents in the Gurgani language are those associated with the Hurufi sect of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Hence, Gurgani must have died out sometime after the fifteenth but certainly before the nineteenth century, for European travelers do not report anything distinctive about the language of Gurgan. The language shift came about through social and commercial interactions that affected the entirety of Iranian languages all over the plateau and ousted the dialects south of the Great Khurasan Road as well as Gurgani north of the Alburz.

As is the case for many other Iranian dialects, one can find individual words attributed to the province of Gurgan in medieval Persian texts and dictionaries. A few lexemes are cited in al-Biruni's al-Saydana (Kiya and Rasid: 69f.). In Zakhira-yi [kh.sup.w]arazmsahi and al-Aghraz al-tibbiyya, two major medical and pharmaceutical reference works compiled by Zayn al-DIn Isma'il Jurjani, the author cites several words, mostly flora and fauna terms, from his hometown Gurgan (Qasimi 2004). A manuscript of Dastur al-adwiya, a fourteenth-century drug-prescription dictionary, cites three plant names from Gurgan (Sadiqi 2002: 40), most likely quoted from Jurjani. Nevertheless, these words alone say little about the language of Gurgan with which they are identified; the language could simply be a variety of Persian.

1. THE HURUFI DOCUMENTS

   Hurufism is one of a series of heretical sects that appeared on the Persian politico-religious scene in the past two millennia. It is a body of antinomian and incarnationist doctrines developed by Fazlallah Astarabadi (740-796/1339-1394), and as its name indicates, the principal features of the cult were elaborate numerological interpretations of the letters of the Perso-Arabic alphabet and an attempt to correlate them with the human physiognomy as the manifestation of the divine essence. The movement that espoused these teachings was relatively short-lived in Persia, lasting for about fifty years after the death of Fazlallah. Nonetheless, the emergence in Safavid times of the Nuqtavi movement, an offshoot of Hurufism dismissed as heretical by Shi'i mainstream adherents, may suggest some degree of survival. On the other hand, Hurufism persisted in Anatolia and the Balkans, primarily under the auspices of the Bektashi order. (1)

   Major Hurufi writings appear in Persian and Turkish as well as in Gurgani, but few have been studied in any detail. The foundational Hurufi text is Fazlallah's Javidan-nama, of which there were two recensions: one subtitled kabir in the Gurgani language, and the other saghir in Persian. The two other prose works by Fazlallah, Nawm-nama and Muhabbat-nama, are also Gurgani with substantial Persian mix. Other known Gurgani works of the Hurufis are Mahram-nama and a vocabulary. The rest of the voluminous literature of the sect is in Persian and Turkish and remains largely in manuscript (2) kept in various libraries and private collections in Europe, Turkey, and Iran. Following is a list of known works in Gurgani.

   (1.) Javidan-nama "The Eternal Book" was begun in 788/1386. It is written in a heavily blended language, with some pages entirely in Persian devoid of Gurgani traits. Some passages in Gurgani are published in Sadiq Kiya with Persian translation (1951: 210-36).

   (2.) Nawm-nama "Book of Dreams" is an account of Fazlallah's dreams, the source of his revelations, and those submitted to him for interpretation. The sketchy character of the text implies an unedited draft. The Gurgani material used in the book is less mixed with Persian as compared to Javidan-nama. It has certain unique Gurgani dialect materials, some obscure. Extracts from Nawm-nama are published by Kiya (1951: 236-46).

   (3.) Muhabbat-nama "Book of Affection" partly duplicates Javidan-nama, but with even less dialect character. It does not add to the Gurgani vocabulary of Javidan-nama or Nawm-nama, hence is the least interesting as a dialectal source.

   (4.) Mahram-nama "Book of the Confidant" is authored by Amir Ishaq, the son-in-law of Fazlallah, who oversaw the activities of the cult in Khurasan and thus was known as the "mursid of Khurasan." Mahram-nama is entirely Gurgani with a lesser degree of blend with Persian than the works of Fazlallah. The text was published by Clement Huart (1909: Ar. 13-58) with French translation (pp. 20-94). Huart's edition is commented on by Kiya (1951: 334-47).

   (5.) Lughat-i astarabadi "Glossary of Astarabadi" was compiled by the Hurufis at an unknown date as an aid to understanding the Gurgani language used in Hurufi works. No further description of this lexicon is given by Kiya, who used it in compiling his Gurgani dictionary (see below).

2. STUDIES ON THE LANGUAGE

   The study of Gurgani is limited to two publications based on original works: Clement Huart (1909) and Sadiq Kiya (1951). Of the Hurufi texts studied by Huart, only one is Gurgani, namely, Mahram-nama. It was published in Perso-Arabic script with French translation (see T.4, above), a glossary (pp. 192-210), and brief grammatical notes (pp. 211-12).

   In Vdzandma-yi gurgdni, Kiya used all the Gurgani materials available to him for a study of the language, i.e., Huart's publication of Mahram-nama and the manuscripts of other Gurgani texts he procured from private and public libraries in Iran. The main body of the Vazanama, as its title suggests, is a glossary (pp. 48-209), consisting of the Gurgani words extracted from Javidan-nama, Nawm-nama, Mahram-nama, and Lughat-i astarabadi. (3) In this glossary, the source of each entry is noted unless it has been taken from Javidan-nama, from which the bulk of headwords is obtained. Arranged in alphabetical order, the glossary is actually a compilation of orthographic forms (graphemes) rather than lexemes, with entries consisting of nouns with prepositions attached to them, conjugated forms of verbs, etc. Despite its claim to comprehensiveness, one finds a number of words missing in Kiya's vocabulary when one compares it with Huart's glossary of Mahram-nama. The book is supplemented by excerpts from Javidan-nama and Nawm-nama (pp. 210-46), a comparison of Gurgani consonants with those of Persian (pp. 247-52), grammatical notes (pp. 253-79), and historical-comparative notes on several Gurgani lexemes (pp. 314-33). There is also a very useful introduction to Gurgani manuscripts and their characteristics (pp. 34-47), as well as to the history of the sect per se (pp. 9-33, 280-313).

   Kiya has avoided the Roman transcription of Gurgani words. Instead he made an attempt to reproduce the exact script forms in vocalized Persian orthography, without speculating about probable pronunciation when the manuscript lacks diacritical marks (that is, in most cases). Notwithstanding the accuracy found in Kiya's study of Gurgani, as is the case with his other linguistic publications, there still exist many ambiguous instances where it is not clear what letter the diacritical marks are meant to target or even what line (above or below) they belong to. The concluding sentences of the Corrigenda are exemplary of the confusion that arises: "In this booklet, whenever the letter [??] is seen in Gurgani words, it is incorrect; [??] is correct, save for those words quoted from Mahram-nama. Instead of ending [??] in certain words in this booklet, the letter [??] is sometimes printed." (4) (p. 350) Thus the accuracy of the work is significantly reduced by the constraints inherent in Persian print technology, true even today.

   Consequently, the linguistic study of the Hurufi corpus remains to be completed. Neither of the aforementioned works attempts to even identify the phonemes of the language. Notwithstanding its thoroughness, Kiya's study lacks an in-depth analytical investigation of the language, although it has set the stage for further study of Gurgani. (5)

3. THE EARLIEST MENTIONS OF GURGANI

   The earliest mentions of the Gurgani language, known also as Astarabadi, are in the early Muslim geographical works. The anonymous author of Hudud al-'alam states:

   Astarabad sahr-e st bar daman-i koh nihada, ba ni'mat u xurram, u abha-yi fardwan u hawa-yi durust. u esan ba du zaban saxun goyand: yak-e ba lutara(-yi) astarabadi u degar-e ba parsi-yi gurgani. (6) (Astarabad is a town in the piedmont with wealth and flowing waters and good climate, and they speak two languages: one is the secret language (lutara) of Astarabad and the other is the Persian of Gurgan.) Another tenth-century geographer, al-Muqaddasi, notes:

   wa-lisdnu Qumis wa-Jurjana mutaqaribani yasta' miluna ilahan yaquluna hadih wa-hakun, wa-lahu haldwatun wa-lisanu ahli Tabaristan muqaribun laha illa fi 'ajalihi. (7) (The languages of Komisene and Hyrcania are similar; they use [ha-, as in] ha-dih ["give!"] and hd-kun ["do!"], and they are sweet. Related to them is the language of Tabaristan, save for its speediness.) The statements above reveal important facts about the linguistic situation in Gurgan a millennium...