A new light on the copula (verb) “ayad/ āyad” in Tabaqat Al- Soufiye

Abstract

The word “ayad/ āyad” is one of the difficult and unknown vocabulary words in the book Tabaqat Al- Soufiye. This verb is used about 300 times in this book and has not been researched before. In this paper, various aspects of this verb have been discussed and analyzed in a descriptive-analytical way through a detailed review of the mentioned book and an overview of some other texts, a careful study of oral stories from South Khorasan and Razavi provinces and with reference to written dialect sources. Accordingly, “ayad/ āyad”- which is also referred to as “âyad”(was) in some reliable sources, is in the third person singular participle in the book Tabaqat Al- Soufiye; the second person singular and the first person plural of this verb are also used in the works of Khwaja Abdullah Ansari. Some morphological forms of this verb, with different meanings, in some other textbooks, such as: Hidayat al-Mutaʽallemin fi al-Ṭibb, Shirzad va Golshad , Kashf al-Mahjub Ali Hujwiri , Shahnameh by Ferdowsi , Diwan by Naser Khosrow Ghobadi , Vis and Rāmin ,Masnavi-ye-Ma'navi, Diwan by Jamal al-Din Abd al-Razzaq Esfahani. The present subjunctive of this copula (verb) is also used in some Iranian dialects with the phonetic forms “ayad/ âyad ” and is used in all six persons.In addition, the verb under study is pronounced ay in some other sentences from the Parthian language (Arsakid Pahlavi) with the same usage.

Keywords

• tabaqat al- soufiye
• copula (verb) “ayad/ āyad”
• dialect
• iranian dialects
• oral story
• khorasan
• parthian language (arsacid pahlavi)