Two hundred years of metamorphoses of the Persian “aorist” in the Russian school of Oriental studies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30842/30346800.2025.1.2.5Keywords:
aorist, history of linguistics, mood, verbal stems, PersianAbstract
In this paper I analyze the evolution of the meaning of the term “aorist” for Persian which was traditionally used in the Russian school of Iranian studies during the 19th and 20th centuries. The meaning of the Persian “aorist” does not correspond to that found in the grammars of ancient Indo-European languages (Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, etc.). Initially, in Persian grammars published in Russia in the 19th century, the term “aorist” was used in the literal meaning of this word (Greek aoristos ‘indefinite’) and denoted the non-past tenses of the Persian verb. The concept of “aorist” was adapted by the Russian orientalists of the 19th century to distinguish the aspect-tense categories of the Persian verb which were traditionally defined in the Arabic grammatical tradition as فعل ماضي (fi‘l māḍī) and فعل مضارع (fi‘l muḍāri‘). The latter was called “aorist”. As the terms and concepts of European linguistics were adopted in the Russian school of Iranian studies (which shifted its focus from classical written Persian to colloquial Farsi), the literal meaning of “aorist” lost its relevance. However, the term “aorist” survived, despite the attempts to eliminate it from Persian textbooks and grammars in Russia, and now denotes the non-past tense of the subjunctive mood.
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