This article deals with the etymologies of a selection of words from various Middle Iranian languages, having as a common feature the assumption of an unusual treatment of the preverb. For the first group of words, a progressive voice assimilation is postulated instead of the expected regressive voice assimilation normally operating in Old Iranian. The second group comprises other phenomena such as dissimilation in contact with the root-initial consonant and double prefixation.
The present paper focuses on Merā bacpan mere kandhoṁ par (2009), the autobiography of the Hindi Dalit writer Sheoraj Singh “Bechain,” with the aim of elucidating the traumas experienced by the author during his childhood and the associated images of “wound” and “burden,” while underscoring the role of the body as a site of autobiographical knowledge. It will demonstrate how Dalit writing is both individual and collective in nature and show how Bechain’s autobiography, as an academic memoir, seeks to substantiate and reinforce the writer’s current social and professional position on the basis of a complex and often challenging life journey.
Colloquial Persian employs -e as a linking verb, commonly regarded as the colloquial variant of ast. This article endeavors to delineate the usage of this verb form in early texts, encompassing both regional and supra-regional ones. Drawing from the instances outlined in the article, the author, then, advances a hypothesis concerning the origin and evolutionary trajectory of this form. Through a meticulous examination, incorporating Early Judaeo-Persian, as well as early and late New Iranian textual remains, this study offers a comprehensive analysis of the subject matter. As the study shows, this form of the linking verb takes different forms in early regional and supra-regional texts, including <-h>, <-y>, <-ʾy>, <ʾyd>, and . The common origin of all these forms is most likely to be *(a)hēd, which still remains in present-day Iranian varieties.
This article presents a critical edition and analysis of a short 16th-century medical treatise entitled Fī bayān aḥwāl al-qaḥwa wa-ḫāṣṣiyyatihā wa-manāfiʿihā, attributed to the Ottoman court physician Muḥammad Badr al-Dīn al-Qūṣūnī. The base manuscript, preserved in Leiden University Libraries as Or. 945:16 (fol. 58r), is collated against two later versions: Ragıb Paşa, K. No. 1482, ff. 56 r–56 v, and al-Nūr al-sāfir ʿan aḫbār al-qarn al-ʿāšir. The treatise, which adopts a question-and-answer format to examine the properties and medicinal benefits of qaḥwa, ‘coffee’, offers insights into the role of coffee in early Ottoman medical discourse and into the adaptation of Galenic humoral theory to a new substance.
