Browsing by Subject "Persian"

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A market for speech : poetry recitation in late Mughal India, 1690-1810
(2014-12-09) Tabor, Nathan Lee Marsh; Hyder, Syed Akbar; Hansen, Kathryn G; Ali, Kamran Asdar; Schofield, Katherine Butler; Minault, Gail
This project focuses on 18th-century Persian and Urdu language mushairahs or poetry gatherings patronized by Mughal India’s urban elite and depicted in period compendiums or tazkirahs. Besides preserving poetry, the compendiums chronicle the social, aesthetic, and sensual aspects of 18th-century public and private gatherings from a stance that prizes the delight of lyric verse. The 1740s in particular mark a watershed decade for poetry exchange and criticism as they bridged several generations of India-based poets who were advancing the “fresh” goals of contemporary Persian writing and who were also recasting Persophone civility according to vernacular sensibilities in a social setting that was arguably the heart of Safavid and Mughal literary production. This dissertation examines how poets, listeners, and patrons enacted a material form of literary sociability that informed the circulation of people and verse over the 1700s. Analyzing this pre-colonial context allows for a more critical understanding of aesthetic and ethical drives in South Asian literary practices, providing a more grounded and critical understanding of lyricism as a cultural practice. By foregrounding the socio-aesthetic implications of recitation as a discursive practice, the present study understands the mushaʿirah as a unique site of literary subjectivity. Hence, the disciplinary boundaries between history, literary criticism, and ethnography are blurred to show that lyricism was not abstracted in 1700s poets’ gatherings. Instead, it formed a highly instantiated social script that allowed for the playfulness of Persian-based aesthetics to parallel the levity of Mughal-era sociability found in period salons. The Mughal literary sphere in the 1700s was governed by expectations of honesty, humor, exaggeration, enchantment, and originality, qualities that were not bounded by one language or textual medium. Historiographically, the compendiums from the 1700s attest to mushairah verse being self-referential, intertextual, and multilingual whereby the conventions of Persian-based aesthetics had a charismatic social life.
Hindi and Urdu Since 1800: A Common Reader
(London, School of Oriental and African Studies; and New Delhi, Heritage, 1990) Snell, Rupert; Shackle, Christopher
Letter From Ernst Carl Wilhelm Sittig to Emmett L. Bennett Jr., August 22, 1951
(1951-08-22) Sittig, Ernst Carl Wilhelm
The perceptibility of duration in the phonetics and phonology of contrastive consonant length
(2012-05) Hansen, Benjamin Bozzell; Myers, Scott P.; Crowhurst, Megan; King, Robert; Lindblom, Björn; Sussman, Harvey
This dissertation investigates the hypothesis that the more vowel-like a consonant is, the more difficult it is for listeners to classify it as geminate or singleton. A perceptual account of this observation holds that more vowel-like consonants lack clear markers to signal the beginning and ending of the consonant, so listeners don’t perceive the precise duration and consequently the phonological contrast may be neutralized in some languages. Three experiments were performed to address these questions using data from Persian speakers. In Experiment I, four speakers produced singleton and geminate tokens of the voiced oral consonants [d,z,n,l,j] and the glottals [h] and glottal stop at three speaking rates. It was found that Persian speakers do distinguish geminate durations from singleton durations for all manners even at very fast speaking rates, and vowels preceding geminates are slightly longer than those preceding singletons. Speaking rate had more of an effect on geminates than on singletons for all segments studied: the durations of the geminates decreased more in fast speech than the durations of the singletons did. In Experiment II, listeners heard manipulated continua of consonants ranging from singletons to geminates. Subjects’ identification curves were modeled using the cumulative Gaussian model. The modeled standard deviation was interpreted as the breadth of the perceptual threshold, and a broader threshold understood to indicate a less distinct perceptual boundary between the two categories. Obstruents [d,z] had smaller breadth values than the sonorants [n,l,j], and the glottals had the largest breadth values of all. This indicates that while sonorants were more difficult for listeners to categorize than obstruents, the glottals were the most difficult to categorize of the segments tested. Experiment III tested whether the modification of a specific parameter, the formant transition duration, would affect the perceptibility of the geminate/singleton contrast. A single token containing the glide [j] was manipulated to produce three different continua, each having a distinctly different manipulated transition: short, normal or long. It was found that the longer the transition was, the broader the perceptual threshold, thus making the consonant harder to categorize.
Who speaks for the Middle East : a new generation of journalists is challenging how their region is covered
(2018-05) Malek, Catherine Jane; Dahlby, Tracy; Atwood, Blake
This article is an investigation of the changes in fcoverage of the Middle East by the English-speaking press. It looks at how the traditional foreign-correspondent model has shifted since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and asks whether hiring reporters who come from the countries they cover will produce more accurate coverage.