A.Z. Foreman | Rōdakī's "Oxus Ode" to Nasr bin Ahmad read in a reconstruction of Early New Persian pronunciation @a.z.foreman74 | Uploaded 1 year ago | Updated 10 hours ago
What you hear in this video is a reconstruction of how at least some forms of Persian may have been pronounced (when reading poetry anyway) in the 10th-11th centuries:
بوی جوی مولیان آید همی
I've read and loved Classical Persian poetry for over ten years, ever since I started learning the language, (first on my own, then while asking questions of the ever-patient and sadly departed Franklin Lewis during office hours with him, then with the wonderful Saeed Ghahremani, and then with a lovely Afghan tutor who would rather I not name him.) Still, I haven't posted recordings in reconstructions of earlier Persian pronunciation on this channel, mostly because the imponderables and unanswerable questions seemed kind of daunting.
But I finally buckled down to do it, beginning with this short and extremely famous poem. I have a much longer piece in Early New Persian in the works (the beginning of the Shahnama) but this more modest bit seemed like a good place to start. I included a verse-translation which I am not at all happy with.
The most important segmental differences (at least from the perspective of a modern Iranian) between contemporary Iranian Persian and the early form of it witnessed by people like Hamza al-Isbahani, Shams-i Qays etc. are as follows (though not all of these happen to occur in the text I read here): the relatively high articulation of /ĭ/ and /ŭ/, the relatively low realization of /ă/, the realization of the ـه suffix as /a/, the existence of the consonants /w xʷ ð β/, a distinction between /ɣ/ and /q/ and the existence of the vowels /ē ō/ alongside /ī ū/. More speculative bits involve: fully unrounded /ā/ and nasalization of long vowels before underlying coda /n/.
Some of these features are found in regional forms of Iranian Persian, and even more are found in some forms of Persian spoken outside of Iran. A distinctive /ē/ survives in Tajik and most forms of Dari, for example, whereas nasalization is retained in Persian as pronounced in the Indian Subcontinent. Other features, not so much. For example /β/ as distinct from both /b/ and /w/ survives nowhere in modern Persian (though its former existence has left traces e.g. in the /w/ found in Kaboli in some words like /sawz/ for "green" or /aw/ for "water").
I avoid lengthening short stressed vowels (especially in closed syllables), since it's quite clear that there was a genuine length difference between long and short vowels in all environments in the earliest period (otherwise things like Shams-i Qays' whole sense of prosody just make no sense). Thus where a modern Iranian might pronounce هست as [hæːst], I simply realize it as [hast].
One thing I didn't do is give /ā/ a more front realization. I sort of suspect that /ā/ was more front, and several scholars do make suggestions of this kind, but the evidence is almost all circumstantial and most of it could go either way apart from one or two things.
In this reading, when syllables containing anceps vowels (basically any final /a i u/) are metrically heavy, this is realized through phonosyntactic gemination of the following consonant wherever possible, rather than simply lengthening the vowel. Gemination of this kind is quite clearly described by medieval grammarians including Shams-i Qays and Nasīruddīn Tōsī. (For more on phonosyntactic gemination in medieval Persian and modern dialects, see this excellent article by Ali Ashraf Sadeghi: https://www.academia.edu/4311788/تشدید_در_فارسی.)
Generally handbooks will tell you that in modern Persian poetic recitation, these vowels are pronounced with increased duration when metrically heavy. Descriptions of Persian versification aimed at Westerners, in my experience, universally state this. But in fact, careful listening to a careful reciter will demonstrate that things are not quite so simple. Modern Iranians do use lengthening, but they also use the kind of gemination described by Shams-i Qays.
If you liked this video, and want to help me make more things like it, go ahead and make a pledge at my patreon:
http://patreon.com/azforeman
There you'll be able to access cool subscriber-only stuff including my weekly readings of Shakespeare's Sonnets and the King James Bible in various 17th century accents. Also you'll be able to see my recordings several days (sometimes a month or more) before I make them available to the public. For example, my reading of the Shahnama is already available to subscribers there a month early as of this writing.
Music: "The Apadana's Shadows" by Farya Faraji
What you hear in this video is a reconstruction of how at least some forms of Persian may have been pronounced (when reading poetry anyway) in the 10th-11th centuries:
بوی جوی مولیان آید همی
I've read and loved Classical Persian poetry for over ten years, ever since I started learning the language, (first on my own, then while asking questions of the ever-patient and sadly departed Franklin Lewis during office hours with him, then with the wonderful Saeed Ghahremani, and then with a lovely Afghan tutor who would rather I not name him.) Still, I haven't posted recordings in reconstructions of earlier Persian pronunciation on this channel, mostly because the imponderables and unanswerable questions seemed kind of daunting.
But I finally buckled down to do it, beginning with this short and extremely famous poem. I have a much longer piece in Early New Persian in the works (the beginning of the Shahnama) but this more modest bit seemed like a good place to start. I included a verse-translation which I am not at all happy with.
The most important segmental differences (at least from the perspective of a modern Iranian) between contemporary Iranian Persian and the early form of it witnessed by people like Hamza al-Isbahani, Shams-i Qays etc. are as follows (though not all of these happen to occur in the text I read here): the relatively high articulation of /ĭ/ and /ŭ/, the relatively low realization of /ă/, the realization of the ـه suffix as /a/, the existence of the consonants /w xʷ ð β/, a distinction between /ɣ/ and /q/ and the existence of the vowels /ē ō/ alongside /ī ū/. More speculative bits involve: fully unrounded /ā/ and nasalization of long vowels before underlying coda /n/.
Some of these features are found in regional forms of Iranian Persian, and even more are found in some forms of Persian spoken outside of Iran. A distinctive /ē/ survives in Tajik and most forms of Dari, for example, whereas nasalization is retained in Persian as pronounced in the Indian Subcontinent. Other features, not so much. For example /β/ as distinct from both /b/ and /w/ survives nowhere in modern Persian (though its former existence has left traces e.g. in the /w/ found in Kaboli in some words like /sawz/ for "green" or /aw/ for "water").
I avoid lengthening short stressed vowels (especially in closed syllables), since it's quite clear that there was a genuine length difference between long and short vowels in all environments in the earliest period (otherwise things like Shams-i Qays' whole sense of prosody just make no sense). Thus where a modern Iranian might pronounce هست as [hæːst], I simply realize it as [hast].
One thing I didn't do is give /ā/ a more front realization. I sort of suspect that /ā/ was more front, and several scholars do make suggestions of this kind, but the evidence is almost all circumstantial and most of it could go either way apart from one or two things.
In this reading, when syllables containing anceps vowels (basically any final /a i u/) are metrically heavy, this is realized through phonosyntactic gemination of the following consonant wherever possible, rather than simply lengthening the vowel. Gemination of this kind is quite clearly described by medieval grammarians including Shams-i Qays and Nasīruddīn Tōsī. (For more on phonosyntactic gemination in medieval Persian and modern dialects, see this excellent article by Ali Ashraf Sadeghi: https://www.academia.edu/4311788/تشدید_در_فارسی.)
Generally handbooks will tell you that in modern Persian poetic recitation, these vowels are pronounced with increased duration when metrically heavy. Descriptions of Persian versification aimed at Westerners, in my experience, universally state this. But in fact, careful listening to a careful reciter will demonstrate that things are not quite so simple. Modern Iranians do use lengthening, but they also use the kind of gemination described by Shams-i Qays.
If you liked this video, and want to help me make more things like it, go ahead and make a pledge at my patreon:
http://patreon.com/azforeman
There you'll be able to access cool subscriber-only stuff including my weekly readings of Shakespeare's Sonnets and the King James Bible in various 17th century accents. Also you'll be able to see my recordings several days (sometimes a month or more) before I make them available to the public. For example, my reading of the Shahnama is already available to subscribers there a month early as of this writing.
Music: "The Apadana's Shadows" by Farya Faraji
