Ancien Culture and Languages

Ancien Culture and Languages

Comparison of the Word order of Sogdian tale of Rostam with five Manichaean Sogdian tales

Document Type : Original Article

Author
Ph. D. in Ancient Culture and Languages of Iran, Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, Tehran, Iran.
Abstract
Sogdian tale of Rostam, among non-religious texts, and five tales from Manichaean Sogdian texts are selected to be examined and compared. Selected structures for Word order analysis of this research based on Dryer`s the "branching direction theory" (BDT). The BDT based on consistent ordering of phrasal and non-phrasal elements. Verb patterners are non-phrasal (nonbranching, lexical) categories and object patterners are (branching) categories. According to the BDT, the word order correlations reflect a tendency to be right-branching or left-branching. To study the word order in these texts, 28 features are standardized according to Correlation and Non-correlation pairs of Dryer and 24 features of Dabir-Moghaddam. 722 pairs of elements are found in Sogdian tale of Rostam and five Manichaean Sogdian tales, 369 pairs are right-branching and 353 pairs are left-branching. So, according to the BDT the word order correlations of these texts reflect tendency to right-branching more than left-branching. Out of 240 pairs of elements found from Rostam tale, 152 pairs are right-branching and 88 pairs are left-branching, and out of 482 pairs of elements found from five Manichaean Sogdian tales, 217 pairs are right-branching and 265 pairs are left-branching. Therefore, based on the BDT, the word order of Rostam tale is "right-branching" and the the word order of the five Manichaean Sogdian tales are "left-branching" with a slight difference.
Keywords

Volume 4, Issue 1 - Serial Number 6
September 2023
Pages 183-218

  • Receive Date 13 March 2024
  • Revise Date 10 June 2024
  • Accept Date 16 June 2024