On a larger scale his work has been nothing less than the rediscovery of
the descendants of ancient Median, long thought wholly to have
disappeared. He named his book on southern Tati "Median Dialect Studies
I", and convincingly justified this title by his masterly summary of what
is known of the languages of Azarbaijan in the Middle Ages and pre-modern
times. This study included in fact Greater Media with Media Atropatene;
and in it he showed that it had been wrong to suppose that the Iranian
dialects spoken within Azarbaijan were immigrant ones from other regions .
Instead he was able to establish that the dialects which he had studied
reflect a linguistic continuum from Azarbaijan southward to where the
Taleshi dialects join the northernmost Tati ones, with the southernmost
Tati ones then linking up in their turn with those of the central
dialects. He also discovered the importance within this continuum of the
Iranian dialects spoken by local Jewish communities, which he studied
extensively in Tehran, Hamadan, Isfahan, Kashan, Golpayegan and other
towns, together with the "secret" Perso-Aramaic language which some of
them used. His conclusion was that "the Jewish dialects and sub-dialects
are the indicators of Median dialects long forced out from urban centers
by Persian. In other words, whereas Persian is the intruder in Western
and Central Persia (that is, the Median territory) the Jewish dialects are
native." His researches as a whole led him to the major discovery that
some western Iranian dialects are as conservative as some eastern Iranian
ones, and that the traditional perception (based essentially on Middle
Persian, Parthian and modern Persian with its variants) of a
morphologically wanting western Iranian is misleading, this being in fact
by no means typical. It seems very fitting that an Iranian scholar from
Hamadan, once the capital of Media, should have discovered these
remarkable facts, and should by his labours have thrown so much new light
on the linguistic heritage of western Iran.
This important and prolonged research continued to be interwoven by Ehsan
Yarshater with his work at Columbia University, to which he returned in
the late summer of 1966. Soon afterwards he established a Center for
Iranian Studies there, of which he continues to be the director; and the
next year he organized a major conference on all aspects of contemporary
Iranian life, together with an exhibition of Persian painting ‹ the most
extensive that had then been held. The conference papers were edited by
him, and were published in 1971 under the title Iran Faces the Seventies.
In 1968, Ehsan Yarshater was elected chairman of the Middle East
department, and served in this capacity until 1973, when he resigned in
order to be able to devote more time to developing the activities of the
Center.
|
