The Persian Contributions To The English Language

The Persian Contributions to the English Language: An Historical Dictionary contains 811 main entries. Its major purpose is to advance the historical study of comprehensive, chiefly lexical borrowing between languages in contact. The ancillary purpose is to show how a collected corpus of loans can shed light on multiple disciplines. This wide-ranging, innovative book is the largest, most up-to-date collection of English words and multiword lexical units borrowed from Persian, directly or through a mediating language such as Hindi/Urdu, Arabic or Turkish. All general English dictionaries were searched, including electronic retrieval from the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. A major feature of the tome is that each dictionary entry gives its first known recorded date in written English, its semantic field, any modern variant form and labels, etymology including 'native' meaning(s), English definitions in chronological order as could be dated, any derivative forms includ-ing functional shifts and compounds, sometimes a grammatical note, the symbolized sources where the loan is recorded, and the degree of naturalization in English.

The largest and most up-to-date collection of English words and multiword units borrowed from the Arabic, directly or indirectly, totalling 2338 items. All major dictionaries in English were surveyed, including new-word collections, and college dictionaries.Each dictionary entry gives the fi rst recorded date of the loan in English, the semantic field, variant forms, etymology, the English definitions, derivative forms, and sometimes grammatical comment. The major sources of each entry are noted, along with the approximate degree of assimilation in English. A substantial part of the book is devoted to nontechnical analytical essays, which treat the forty-six semantic areas so as to embrace all disciplines and throw light on the individual subject. Other essays treat the phonological and linguistic aspects of the data, so as to show how languages in contact interact and ultimately influence each other's culture. This is a wide-ranging, innovational book that advances the study of comprehensive borrowing within languages over the centuries.

Out of a lifetime of study of the ancient Near East, Professor Olmstead has gathered previously unknown material into the story of the life, times, and thought of the Persians, told for the first time from the Persian rather than the traditional Greek point of view. "The fullest and most reliable presentation of the history of the Persian Empire in existence."—M. Rostovtzeff

The rich variety of the English vocabulary reflects the vast number of words it has taken from other languages. These range from Latin, Greek, Scandinavian, Celtic, French, Italian, Spanish, and Russian to, among others, Hebrew, Maori, Malay, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, andYiddish. Philip Durkin's full and accessible history reveals how, when, and why. He shows how to discover the origins of loanwords, when and why they were adopted, and what happens to them once they have been. The long documented history of English includes contact with languages in a variety of contexts, including: the dissemination of Christian culture in Latin in Anglo-Saxon England, and the interactions of French, Latin, Scandinavian, Celtic, and English during the Middle Ages; exposure to languages throughout the world during the colonial era; and the effects of using English as an international language of science. Philip Durkin describes these and other historical inputs, introducing the approaches each requires, from the comparative method for the earliest period to documentary and corpus research in the modern. The discussion is illustrated at every point with examples taken from a variety of different sources. The framework Dr Durkin develops can be used to explore lexical borrowing in any language. This outstanding book is for everyone interested in English etymology and in loanwords more generally. It will appeal to a wide general public and at the same time offers a valuable reference for scholars and students of the history of English.

Iran is a country with a deep and complex history. Over several thousand years, Iran has been the source of numerous creative contributions to the spiritual and literary world, and the site of many remarkable manifestations of material culture. The special place that Iran has come to hold in contemporary historical events, most recently as a center stage actor in the unfolding and interconnected drama of worldwide nuclear arms proliferation and terrorism, is all the more reason to explore the characters and personality of Iran and Iranians. The A to Z of Iran is designed to give the reader a quick and understandable overview of specific events, movements, people, political and social groups, places, and trends. Through its extensive chronology, introduction, bibliography, appendixes, and more than double the number of cross-referenced dictionary entries as in the previous edition, the work allows for considerable exploration of a number of historical and contemporary topics and issues. In particular, the modern period, defined as 1800-present, is covered extensively.

Webs of Words: New Studies in Historical Lexicology brings together ten papers on aspects of the history of words and vocabulary, which address aspects of Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English (including Caribbean varieties), German, Italian, Māori, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, and other languages. In the first four essays, focussing on pre-1800 material, Karel Kučera and Martin Stluka’s opening essay discusses the plotting of the relative historical frequency of common words, drawing on their work with the diachronic portion of the Czech National Corpus; Ian Lancashire asks why Tudor England had no monolingual English dictionary; Chiara Benati discusses the interplay between Low German, High German, and Latin in an early modern surgical text, and Mateusz Urban sorts out the competing etymologies of English balcony, Italian balcone, and similar forms in Persian and Russian. The next six turn to more recent material. Jane Samson analyzes the nineteenth-century debate as to whether the Māori language was too primitive to have a word for “blue”; Vivien Waszink discusses the Dutch prefixes bio- and eco- and their documentation in a new dictionary; Tommaso Pellin examines a series of attempts to provide a grammatical terminology in Chinese; Lise Winer surveys the naming of fauna in the English / Creole of Trinidad and Tobago; Mirosława Podhajecka writes on the treatment of Russian loanwords in the current revision of the Oxford English Dictionary, with special attention to Google Books as a research tool; and Isabel Casanova asks whether Portuguese dictionaries should register English words. The contributions to this volume share an interest in empirical evidence rather than in lexicological study at a highly theoretical level, and in the wide contextualization of the words which constitute this evidence in the social and cultural lives of their users.

Księga pamiątkowa dla Profesora Stanisława Stachowskiego z okazji jego 85 urodzin * * * A Festschrift for Professor Stanisław Stachowski on the Occasion of His 85th Birthday