This is the only study in a Western European language of an important part of the intellectual and cultural history of the Persianate world in its formative phase. Persian dictionaries (farhangs) of the Islamic era, compiled principally in India, represent a unique linguistic undertaking that has no counterpart in pre-modern Europe. Solomon Baevskii (University of St Petersburg, emeritus) based his work on books and manuscripts from South Asia, Iran, Central Asia and Russia, charting the evolution of these documents from lexical and cultural-historical perspectives. Published...

This is the first comprehensive reference grammar of Tajik, the Persian of Central Asia, to appear in English. It describes the modern literary language, with examples of colloquial and dialect usage, from the early Soviet period (1920s) up until Tajikistan's independence after 2001. Grammatical examples, taken from a variety of literary sources, are given in both the Cyrillic and Perso-Arabic scripts. Complete verb paradigms, a grammatical index, and parallel word-indexes in both writing systems make it easy to find particular points.
Essential for the Iranologist and comparative...