Tracing a Gypsy Mixed Language through Medieval and Early Modern Arabic and Persian Literature
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Kristina Richardson
Abstract:
In this paper I will analyze and trace samples of a tribal dialect that thrived in medieval Islam and has survived into the modern period. It is a mixed language or para-language that takes the form of embedding a substitutive vocabulary into the grammatical structure of other languages and it has historically been spoken within communities of peripatetics and commercial nomads, or Gypsy 1 groups. In 10th-century Arabic sources produced in Būyid Iraq and Iran, non-speakers named this language lughat al-mukaddīn (the language of the beggars), another demonstration of an outsider’s perspective. However, speakers of this language called it lughat Banī Sāsān (the language of the Sāsān clan) or lughat al-shaykh Sāsān (the language of the Master Sāsān). The language, in name and application, was not identified with a territory or an ethnicity, but rather with a peripatetic tribal group, the Banū Sāsān, whose members worked as beggars and entertainers. As early as the 13th century, speakers of this language referred to it as al-sīn and non-speakers named it lughat/lisān al-ghurabāʾ (the language of the Gypsies). Between the 13th and 15th centuries, Arabic and Persian writers composed texts explaining various Sāsānī words to their Arabicand Persian-speaking audiences. Texts also survive from this period with snippets of sīn prose and poetry.
© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Elizabeth Sgalitzer Ettinghausen
- Articles
- The First Iconoclasm in Islam: A New History of the Edict of Yazīd II (AH 104/AD 723)
- Two Arabic Deeds of House Lease Agreement on Papyrus
- The development of Sūq al-Qaṭṭānīn quarter, Jerusalem
- Erdbeben in arabischen Gedichten der Ayyūbiden- und Mamlūkenzeit
- Tracing a Gypsy Mixed Language through Medieval and Early Modern Arabic and Persian Literature
- From One Thousand and One Nights to Safavid Iran: A Persian Tawaddud
- ʿAli Qoli Jebādār et l’enregistrement du réel dans les peintures dites farangi sāzi
- Le temps d’une vie. Une « famille de textes » autour d’Abū Šāma entre VIIe/XIIIe et IXe/XVe siècle
- Reading tarājim with Bourdieu: prosopographical traces of historical change in the South Asian migration to the late medieval Hijaz
- Reviews
- Betül Başaran, Selim III, Social Control and Policing in Istanbul at the End of the Eighteenth Century
- Mohammed Hocine Benkheira/Avner Giladi/Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen/Jacqueline Sublet, La famille en islam d’après les sources arabes, Les indes savantes
- Michael Crawford, Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab
- Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Michael North, eds., Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia
- Alev Masarwa, Bildung – Macht – Kultur. Das Feld des Gelehrten Abū ṯ-Ṯānāʾ al-Ālūsī (1802‒1854) im spätosmanischen Bagdad
- Jean-Michel Mouton, Dominique Sourdel and Janine Sourdel-Thomine, Mariage et séparation à Damas au moyen âge. Un corpus de 62 documents juridiques inédits entre 337/948 et 698/1299 (Documents relatifs à l’histoire des Croisades XXI)
- David S. Powers, Zayd
- Hasan Shuraydi, The Raven and the Falcon: Youth and Old Age in Medieval Arabic Literature
- Guy G. Stroumsa, The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 225 pp, ISBN: 978-0-19-873886-2.
- Francesca Trivellato, Leor Halevi, and Cátia Antunes (eds.), Religion and Trade: Cross-Cultural Exchanges in World History, 1000–1900
