| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,000,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,000,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000)
Fiscal Year 2004: ¥700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥700,000)
Fiscal Year 2003: ¥800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000)
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| Research Abstract |
Sogdian belongs to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. The Sogdian people were international traders along the Silk Road and their language served as a lingua franca of Central Asia during the period when they were active until the 10th century. In the 11th century they were invaded and subsequently ruled by the Islamic force and their language was no longer spoken.
The Iranian language group comprises such ancient languages as Avestan and Old Persian spoken long before the Christian era as well as many modern languages such as Persian, Kurdish, Pashto, Yaghnobi (so-called Modern Sogdian), etc. Apart from the ancient and modern Iranian languages, the group also comprises Middle Iranian languages which were spoken and written before the Islamization of Iran and Central Asia. Sogdian belongs to the eastern dialect group of Middle Iranian. Due to the fact that many texts materials are preserved both from Ancient and Middle Iranian periods and also due to richness of mo
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dern spoken languages, the linguistic study of the Sogdian language has mainly been philological and diachronic ; one has been interested in the way how Iranian had changed through the period of ca.2500 years and the discoveries have been compared with those of the other branches of the Indo-European language family. Thus the Sogdian grammars hitherto published were written from the view point of diachronic change. During the period of research supported by the grant I mainly focused on the synchronic aspects of the Sogdian language and tried to present the descriptive grammar based on the synchronic analysis of texts.
As a result or fruit of my study of the last three years I have drawn up a new and comprehensive grammar of Sogdian comprising ca.300 pages which includes a short essay of the history of Sogdians and the history of the study of the language from the very beginning of the discovery of Sogdian text materials in the early 20th century. In the hope that those who are interested in Sogdian might teach themselves, my grammar is consisting of 23 lessons provided with exercises and a glossary. Each sentence and word cited in the grammar is provided with a phonetic representation, which will be helpful for non-specialists, because the scripts employed for writing Sogdian are so-called consonant scripts without any letter for representing vowels.
I have also published several separate articles and a book concerning the related subjects. One of the most interesting was an inscription of 580 CE discovered recently in Xian, China. The inscription is important in that no Sogdian text had hitherto been discovered in mainland China, where there must have been numerous Sogdians as permanent residents and traveling merchants. Less
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