Form and Meaning in Persian Vocabulary: The Arabic Feminine Ending.

• Author: KAYE, ALAN S.
• Position: Review

Form and Meaning in Persian Vocabulary: The Arabic Feminine Ending. By JOHN R. PERRY. Persian Studies Series, no. 12. Costa Mesa, Calif.: MAZDA PUBLISHERS, 1991. Pp. xv + 243, 11 in Persian.

Having studied a variety of Arabic dialects over a period of many years, I have become familiar with divergent pronunciations and meanings for given Semitic roots. However, it is not until one looks beyond Arabic--at languages such as Hausa, Malay, Persian, Swahili, Turkish, and Urdu--that one can truly appreciate the aforementioned diversity, since it often seems that an Indo-European language such as Persian may sometimes, as bizarre as it may sound at first, be regarded as another Arabic dialect due to the heavy presence of Arabic loanwords, which can approach eighty to ninety percent in some genres (cf. Persian [amale.sup.[subset]] 'laborer, coolie, ditch digger', also as a plural, with a singular [aamel.sup.[subset]] [according to Soleiman Haim's Persian-English Dictionary (Teheran, 1953), 571], with another plural [amale.sup.[subset]]-jaat [a Persian-Arabicate hybrid going back to Middle Persian] [less than] Arabic [amala.sup.[subset]] 'doers; makers', although this Arabic pl ural is not given in Hans Wehr's A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, ed. J. Milton Cowan [Ithaca: Spoken Language Services, 1976, 646]).

As is well known, the Persian lexicon contains an enormous number of Arabic loanwords, as do many other so-called "Islamic" languages, most of which are still written in the Arabic script. Not all loanwords given by Perry are to be found in Haim (1953), i.e., are well known; e.g., laa [adri.sup.[contains]] 'I do not know' is given by Haim (ibid., p. 718), but not laa [adriya .sup.[contains]]'agnosticism' (p. 26). S. Haim's English-Persian Dictionary (Teheran, 1987), 26, also does not list laa [adriya.sup.[contains]].

Turning specifically to graphemic matters, Perry states at the beginning of the treatise that the Arabic writing system is "technically not an alphabet, but a vowel-deficient universal syllabary" (p. 4). Although the Arabic script is not considered syllabic (such as the classic examples of the kindred Amharic or the kana of Japanese), the languages using this cursive system have preserved, on the whole, the great majority of words borrowed from Arabic in their native orthography. One notable exception here is the Turkic language, Uighur (for the details see my "Adaptations of Arabic Script," in The World's Writing Systems...