Investigating the Effects of Metrics on Ferdowsi’s Narrative Rhetoric and Language

Abstract

This paper attempts to suggest some scientific criteria for investigating what details have been added to his classic text because of some irresistible metric forces. In this research, we assumed that Ferdowsi had not changed the content of his source except for metrics. Hence, for finding how and why these changes have occurred, we have selected 1000 stanzas from one of his stories called Siavash. Then, we have specified the stanzas affected by metrics, and their sentence changes (not lexical) are analyzed. We have analyzed what Ferdowsi had added both from the syntagmatic point of view and paradigmatic point of view. Consequently, the most significant effects of metrics on Ferdowsi’s narration are “Langauge Extension” in the syntagmatic axis and “Ironical Language” in the paradigmatic axis. In order to explain the changes that are observed in Ferdowsi’s version of the story, it is compared with the version written by a famous writer, Sa’alabi.

Keywords

• shahnameh
• myth of siavash
• metrics
• poetic narration
• sa’alabi