Persian scholar Badrozzaman Qarib dies at 91

TEHRAN – Persian language and literature scholar, writer and linguist Badrozzaman Qarib has died at the age of 91 apparently of COVID19, the Academy of Persian Language and Literature announced on Tuesday.

Qarib was a permanent member of the academy and famous for her research work on a dictionary of the Sogdian language.

In a message published on Tuesday, the director of the academy, Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, expressed his condolences over the demise of the great scholar.

“The scholar belonged to a noble family. She was internationally famous for her comprehensive research on ancient Persian languages,” he said.

Born in 1929, Qarib got her Ph.D. in ancient languages from the University of Pennsylvania. She was a graduate of Persian literature from the University of Tehran.

She had studied Persian and history with great scholars such as Mohammad Moin, Ehsan Yarshater and Ebrahim Purdavud, where she found her deep interest in ancient Iranian languages and continued her studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Qarib was an expert on the Sogdian language. Sogdian is one of the Eastern Middle Iranian languages once spoken in Sogdiana (northern Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) before the Islamization of the area in the 10th century.

 Sogdians were traders along the Silk Roads and founded many diasporas along the routes, with the result that the bulk of its material was discovered in Turfan and Dunhuang in western China.

The Sogdian language was written in three scripts, Sogdian, Manichean and Syriac. While only religious texts were written in Manichean and Syriac scripts, other kinds of texts, both religious and secular, were recorded in Sogdian script, which was a kind of a national script, although it ultimately originated from Aramaic script.

Qarib’s noteworthy credits are a dictionary of the Sogdian language into Persian and English, “Structural Analysis of Verbs in the Sodigan Language”, “Silent Languages” and “Sodigan Studies”.

Courtesy of Tehran Times