This article consists of a descriptive account of the traditional marriage rites in Māzandarān, followed by two dialect texts with English translation. The ethnography describes various stages involved in a typical traditional marriage, including the proposal and betrothal, observances prior to the wedding ceremony, the wedding procession, the bridal chamber, the unveiling feast, and the initial stages of married life, covering altogether a period of slightly more than one year. The texts are expected to contribute to the study of the largely understudied language of Māzandarān. A brief grammar and a glossary accompany the texts.
A Northwest Iranian dialect, Aftari, is grouped both diachronically and typologically together with the other dialects spoken around the town of Semnān, east of Tehran. For this group the designation “Komisenian”, after the old name of the province, is proposed in the article. As is the case with the neighboring Caspian dialects to the north, Aftari is the language of postpositions, and it has a relatively elaborate system of personal and demonstrative pronouns. Aftari shares with Tabari the element -enn- in the present indicative, a remnant of the Old Iranian present participle * -ant-. In terms of ergativity, Aftari holds a position somewhere between Tabari, which has none, and the Central Plateau Dialects which have preserved the system. Remnants of the Middle Iranian ergativity remain in Aftari as a distinct set of personal endings for the past transitive; in the past, these acted as agents of transitive verbs. Thus, transitivity still plays a role in the past conjugation, but there are indications that the difference is fading away, most notably in 3rd person singular forms. The intransitive past tenses are marked by -št- preceding the personal endings, except for the 3rd person singular, which has neither. The perfect tense has various constructions, often merging with the preterit, and thus may not be authentic to Aftari.
This article transcribes, translates, analyzes, and identifies a set of seventeen poems and songs collected in the 1830s by the pioneering Orientalist and folklorist Aleksander Chodźko, who published the songs using Perso-Arabic characters. The verses are the oldest known documents in the Māzandarāni language, also known as New or Modern Tabari, which has some three million speakers in the Persian province of Māzandarān, located south of the Caspian Sea. The texts were collected from various locations in Māzandarān and hence represent more than one dialect of New Tabari. Linguistic analysis shows that Tabari has not undergone fundamental change in the last two centuries, though certain words and grammatical traits have already ceased to be used in the language. While comparing the texts with other surviving Tabari documents from the 19th Century does yield some answers, a number of questions remain.