Gerund in Persian and Russian: Case Study in Dictionaries

Gerund in Persian and Russian: Case Study in Dictionaries

Leyla Asgari, Parvaneh Fakhamzadeh

Language for special purposes

Linguistics and cognitive Aspects, Knowledge Representation and Computational Linguistic, Terminology, Lexicography, and Didactics

Gunter Narr Verlag Tubingen

2001

Introduction

Persian needs to form new words for new concepts on a large scale. Derivative words is one of the main tools for word-formation in this language. Gerundive forms are considered as types of derivatives by means of which many words can be made and many concepts transferred. One of the gerundive forms in Persian is the one which ends in –eš. The productivity of this construct in recent years has made it widely popular in technical bilingual English/Persian dictionaries especially in fields like physics, geophysics, chemistry, chemical engineering and hygiene.

A precise definition for this group of words and expressions which have been made through such a mechanism, is to be inevitably on the basis of grammatical studies and also the way they have been divined in general dictionaries. The study and analysis of gerundive forms in these dictionaries can be the first step towards resolving the problems in the way of constructing and applying scientific and technical terms. Therefore, this paper has concentrated on the way the gerundive form ending in –eš has been presented in five contemporary and frequently used dictionaries of Persian. Dehkhoda, Mo'in, Amid, Moshiri, and Sadri-Afshar has taken into its scope of study issues of (phonetic) transcription, grammatical labels, forms of definition and examples given.

The analysis presented in this paper is on how the ferundive forms of Persian have been introduced in general dictionaries of this language based on a comparison between general dictionaries of Persian and those of Russian. One of the reasons why Russian dictionaries have been chosen is their organized and thought-out structure especially as in Slovar russkovo yazika and Ozhigov. Another reason has been the similarity in meaning and function between gerundive forms in Russian and those in Persian despite their structural differences. (The examples of Russian gerundive forms understudy end in (nie) and (n'e).

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