He was then appointed Assistant Professor of Persian in the Faculty of
Theology; but was awarded in the same year a fellowship by the British
Council to study educational methods in England. When in London he called
on W.B. Henning, and, swiftly appreciating the depth of his learning,
resolved to abandon other plans and study pre-Islamic Iranian languages
and culture with him. His interest in this field had already been
awakened by Pour-Davud; but at that time the teaching available in it in
Tehran was at an elementary level. He enrolled accordingly for one of the
courses created by Henning at the School of Oriental and African Studies,
London University, in Old and Middle Iranian; and years of exacting study
followed, during which he had to add English and German to his knowledge
of French, and to absorb analytic and critical methods of handling texts.
In addition, he set himself, with energy and discernment, to learn all
that he could of Western art and architecture, painting and music, using
part of the vacations to travel in other European countries for this
purpose.
Henning himself was deeply interested at this time in the dialects of
north-western Iran. In 1950 he had been able to make brief notes on one
of them, to the south-west of Qazvin, and this, he thought, might prove to
be a link in a long chain of related dialects, all in imminent danger of
dying out . The evidence was too scanty, however, for this to be then
more than a well-reasoned piece of deduction. With Henning's
encouragement, Ehsan Yarshater determined to undertake the search for such
dialects, and this developed into his scholarly lifework. With it he was
to make a major contribution to Iranian linguistic studies, recording and
analysing dialect after dialect of what he came to term the Tati-Taleshi
groups, and gaining a rich store of knowledge that fully substantiated
Henning's brilliant but tentative surmise. His work was much appreciated
by Henning himself, who over the years provided Ehsan Yarshater with
"enriching advice, friendship and support."
In 1953 Ehsan Yarshater, having obtained the degree of M.A. by
examination, returned to Iran to pursue this research; but there was much
else there to claim his attention. He was at once appointed lecturer in
ancient Iranian languages in the Faculty of Letters at Tehran University,
and assistant to Pour-Davud. Some excellent students attended his
classes, and he is gratefully remembered by them, as by numerous
generations of their successors, for the clarity and detail of his
teaching, his patience and evenness of temper, and his concern for their
progress. (Thus once, when a strike closed the university, he continuedquietly giving his courses at his own home rather than let
their work be interrupted.)
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