Iranian Languages as Gardens

Abstract

The main West Iranian languages, i.e. Old Persian, Parthian, Middle Persian, New Persian and – in some respects – Avestan, may be studied in a uniquely continuous development stretching over close to 3 000 years. These languages are not only the result of their genetic inter-relations but also of their cultural, religious and political history. They may be labelled ‘high languages’ (‘Hochsprachen’), in the sense that they are cultured and standardized and used for a great number of purposes by people of various linguistic backgrounds. This article presents an over-view of their development seen from a specific perspective. The traditional Iranian walled-in garden, the pairi-daēzaof the Avesta, is used as a metaphor for a high language in contrast to the free vegetation of spontaneous human speech in social interaction. The latter is here called ‘dialect’, a concept that includes both ‘geolect’ and ‘sociolect’. These high language ‘gardens’ are thus viewed as a kind of cultural artefacts. Among other things, this has implications for views on the dichotomy literacy/orality, showing that writing is not language and that ‘orality’ belongs both to ‘high language’ and ‘dialect’. It is furthermore argued that literacy and orality were present in complementary distribution throughout the whole known history of the Iranian cultural sphere. Iranian Languages as Gardens 143 The enclosed garden is an age-old cultural phenomenon in Iran. It is common knowledge that the international word ‘paradise’, based on a Classical Greek paradeisos, goes back to Avestan pairi-daēza-, ‘eine rings-, rundum gehende, sich zusammenschliessende Umwallung, Ummauerung’ as Bartholomae has it in his Altiranisches Worterbuch (1904: col. 865), i. e. something walled-in. It is perhaps less ready knowledge that the regular New Persian development of this word is pālīz (classical pālēz, nowadays meaning ‘kitchen-garden’, ‘melon-bed’) (Horn 1893: 63, no 279), and that firdaus is a later re-borrowing from Greek. One of the candidates for the original paradise is Takht-i Sulaimān, i.e. the old Ganzaka or Shīz, in Azerbaijan (Ringbom 1951: 86-91 et pass.; Ringbom 1958; Wikander 1946: 100 et pass.). This structure was situated on the top of an old volcano, where a small central crater lake fed streams that ran in the four directions down through what seems to have been a walled-in garden. For the sake of the metaphoric use I am going to make here of the garden, it is essential that it is walled-in, that it is separated from the wild vegetation outside. It is irrigated, cultivated, ordered and refined – perhaps through centuries or even millennia. It is what is called in Arabic an ḥadīqa (from the Arabic verb ḥadaqa, which corresponds rather precisely to the Avestan pairi-daēza-). Here I shall use the walled-in garden as a metaphor for a language, not any kind of language but a ‘high language’, a cultured language (at times written, at times not), like Persian, Latin, English and Mandarin Chinese. Gardens are cultivated by their gardeners in the same way as languages by language masters and grammarians. The gardener/grammarian prunes the wild, freely growing linguistic flora into a neat language garden. Even if this may seem an impersonal process, it is obvious that people of flesh and blood run it – although often anonymously. They are the ones who work with shaping and normalizing their cultural language and its written representations as well as 1 The Persian word pardīs, used in the sense of ‘garden’ generally and in specific modern usages such as ‘university campus’, seems to be a recent innovation based on the old pairi-daēza-.