This book is a selected collection of the scholarly production on Middle and New Persian literature by professor emeritus Bo Utas, Uppsala University, presented to him on his 70th birthday. Out of 19 articles, 15 are in English and four in French. Of special interest is an article entitled ‘‘Genres in Persian literature 900 to 1900’’. Other articles deal with, among other subjects, the influence from Sufism on the Classical Persian poetry, non-religious Book Pahlavi literature, Modern Persian literature, New Persian prosody, and manuscript edition.

The book contains 21 contributions to a colloquium held in March 2006 in honour of W. Sundermann and dealing with various aspects of the literatures in the Middle Iranian languages. Texts and motifs and their origins and developments in Middle Persian, Parthian, Saka and Sogdian texts and in the unique Manichaean Bactrian fragment are discussed and presented together with a depiction of Avestan, Aramaic, Mandaic and even Celtic motifs.

Twenty-seven articles by prominent Indo-Europeanists, Indologists and Iranists have been selected to commemorate the most innovative and consequent exeget of Avesta (the missal of the pre-islamic Paniranian religion, Mazdaeism or Parsism) of our times, Jean Kellens and to inscenery his intellectual pathway and thereby also the present debates around the oldest language and religious history of the common ancestors of Indians and Iranians. The themes Jean Kellens has put into fresh light, intertextuality, stilistics, ideology, textual history and reuse, are especially represented, but always under the light of the mother discipline: grammar.

The book investigates the deep linguistic contact between Iranians and Arameans from the formation of the Achaemenid empire onwards, and focuses especially on the linguistic relationship between Middle Persian and Classical Syriac during the Sasanian empire, a subject on which a modern systematic study was still missing. The first part of the book is a detailed study of the historical and linguistic conditions which favoured the entry of a great number of Iranian words into Syriac and the linguistic consequences of such borrowings. The second part contains, in dictionary form, hundreds of entries in which each single Iranian loanword is considered, together with its etymon, alternative forms, and derivatives. Each entry also includes a list of occurrences and the relevant bibliography. A complete index of words closes the volume. The study of the prolonged contact between such prestigious languages as Syriac and Middle Persian, that are only attested in written records, enriches our knowledge of the typologies of language interference and bilingualism in ancient society. More specifically, it allows to recover a considerable amount of otherwise unattested Middle Persian vocabulary and provides new insights into the linguistic systems of both Syriac and Middle Persian.

In this work, the Authors provide a detailed analysis of the Pashto Simple “Naked” Verbs, i.e. all not suffixed simple verbs, and the linguistic dynamics at work still nowadays. The classification of used Simple “Naked” Verbs in three main groups (those belonging to the “norm”; those whose position is changing and can be located in a “zone frontière”; those showing a complexification linked to the aspect) will be useful and helpful for Pashto students and scholars, for researchers in the field of Iranian philology and for linguists.

Pashto, one of the national languages of Afghanistan, is an archaic language of the Iranian family with a vocabulary of extraordinary variety and interest. In his "New Etymological Vocabulary of Pashto", Georg Morgenstierne identifies loanwords and traces inherited words back to their origins in Old Iranian and beyond. A completely new work, it supersedes the same author's "Etymological Vocabulary of Pashto", which has been a standard work of reference ever since its publication in 1927.

In this work, the Authors provide an analysis of the entire verbal system of Pashto, the language of some 50 million speakers in Afghanistan, Pakistan and diasporas. As an Iranian language, Pashto verbs share some main behaviours with the other sister languages, as Persian and Kurdish, but with some peculiarities. This study will permit to fully understand Pashto verbal system from the syntactic and morphologic points of view, at the same time offering complete dialectological, typological and lexicographical information, as well as ample phraseologies.