A Tajik Persian Reference Grammar

Perry (Persian language and civilization, U. of Chicago) aims to provide quick, easy, and comprehensive access to the grammatical structures of Tajik Persian of Central Asia as used in writing and educated speech from the early years of the 20th century to the present. He takes account that the language has changed rapidly over the past three generations, partly because of influence from Uzbek, Russian, and other foreign languages and partly from two waves of government sponsored linguistic engineering. The detailed table of contents and tables, and three indexes, he says, should allow readers at any level of competence, whether familiar with the Cyrillic or the Perso-Arabic writing system, to find a particular paradigm or syntagm with illustrations of usage. The reference covers phonology and orthography, the morphology of nominals and verbs, syntax, and lexis and sociolinguistics. Annotation c2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

John R. Perry, Ph.D. Cantab. (1970) in Oriental Languages, is Professor of Persian Language and Civilization at the University of Chicago. He is the author ofForm and Meaning in Persian Vocabulary:The Arabic Feminine Ending (Bibliotheca Persica, Mazda Publishers, 1991) and numerous articles on Persian and Tajik.