His dominant professional interest continued to be his dialect studies,
and these two sabbatical years gave him further opportunities for
intensive field work. His researches, which had begun in the 1950's with
southern Tati, had been extended during the intervening years; and down to
1979 he was able to work systematically over a wide area, which included
Taleshi-speaking districts on the west Caspian coast, Khalkhal and Tarom
in Azerbaijan, Kho'in and the Zanjan region, Rudbar, Kuhpaya and Alamut to
the east of Qazvin and Ramand to the south of it, with the Sava and Kashan
districts, and regions yet further south where Central dialects are
spoken. In recording many largely unknown or ill-explored village
dialects of this area Ehsan Yarshater has shown great exactness and
analytical skill, and his attention to detail in both phonology and
morphology makes his work outstanding among recent contributions to
Iranian dialectology, setting him in the great tradition of Andreas and
Mann, Zhukovsky, Christensen and Morgenstierne. He is never a
reductionist, nor one to gloss over problems by superimposing a phoneme
where there is variation; and with his care for detail he truly shows
language at work. His descriptions are full of precise observations about
differences in usage between speakers of different ages, and even between
inhabitants of different quarters of the same village; and where
documents exist he has studied the changes between earlier and modern
speech. He sets this minute recording in a wider context by consistently
noting similarities between dialects and dialect-groups; and he has traced
changes (as for example in postpositional patterns) which may reflect
usages in the Turkish superstratum. He observes moreover the ways of life
and social interactions which tend to bring about linguistic interference
such as by Turkic with Iranian, or by one form of Iranian with another.
No description of an Iranian dialect offers a more delicate analysis of
intricate relationships (such as morphological case, number and
gender-marking in relation to the scales of animacy, reference and
thematicity) than his study of southern Tati; and this makes it ideal for
use in typological studies and general works on variation and language
change . Nor is there anything comparable to his study of gender in the
dialects of the Kashan area, with its admirable analysis of the multiple
parameters, only a few of which have ever attracted the attention of
researchers. The same precision and depth characterize his coverage of
whole areas and his attention to minute difference between closely related
dialects; and this has then enabled him to trace the network of linguistic
change on a micro-scale.
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