The Problems of Teaching Ancient Iranian Languages (Avestan, Old Persian, and Sogdian)

Document Type : علمی - پژوهشی

Author

Department of Iranian ancient languages, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, University of Tehran

Abstract

Teaching ancient languages has an important difference from teaching modern languages. In contrast, the student of modern languages focus on four skills, speaking, listening, reading, and writing, the acquisition of an ancient language, more than anything, is based on text comprehension. That is why modern language teaching methods, like CLT, are not very useful for teaching ancient languages. Moreover, most ancient texts are not general texts, but there are literary, religious, or legal texts, and the student needs additional and information to comprehend the texts. In this paper, at first, we notice the problems of teaching ancient Iranian languages and then describe what can be called the “teaching method of Avestan, Old Persian, and Sogdian. At the end, we compare the available books for learning these languages. All of these books use the method, named “grammar-translation,” but the most useful ones have original texts besides the grammar explanations and pay more attention to read and to analyze of the texts.

Keywords

References

- زرشناس، زهره، 1387. دست‌نامة سغدی (دستور، داستان‌های گزیده، واژه‌نامه)، تهران، پژوهشگاه علوم انسانی و مطالعات فرهنگی.
- مولایی، چنگیز. 1384. راهنمای زبان فارسی (دستور زبان، گزیده متون، واژه‌نامه)، تهران. مهرنامگ.
- Cantera, A., & Redard, C. (2019). Introduction à l’avestique recent,
 Girona.
- Chung, S., (2006). “A communicative approach to teaching grammar: theory and Practice”, The English Teacher 34: 33-50.
- Duchesne-Guillemin, J. (1985).” Anquetil du Perron”, Ehsan Yarshater (ed.), Encyclopedia Iranica 2(1): 100-101
- Gershevitch, I. (1961). A Grammar of Manichaean Sogdian, Oxford, Basil Blackwell.
- Gippert, J. (2002). “The Avestan language and its problems”, in Nicholas Sims-Williams (ed.), Indo-Iranian Languages and Peoples, Oxford, British Academy/Oxford University Press: 165-187
- Golkova, D., & Hubakova, S. (2014), “Productive Skills in second language learning”, Social and Behavioral Sciences 143: 477-481
- Jackson, A.V.W. (1892). An Avesta Grammar in Comparison with Sanskrit, Stuttgart.
- Jackson, A.V.W. (1893). Avesta reader, First Series: Easier Texts, Notes, Vocabulary, Stuttgart.
- Kent, R., 1953. Old Persian, Grammar, Texts, Lexicon, New Haven, Connecticut. American Oriental Society (Second edition, revised)
- Koutropoulos, A. (2011). “Modernizing Classical Language Education: Communicative Language Teaching & Educational Technology Integration in Classical Greek”, Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self Knowledge 9(3): 35-69.
- Reichelt, H. (1909). Awestiches Elementarbuch, Heidelberg.
-  Reichelt, H. (1911). Avesta Reader, Strassburg,
- Savignon, S. (1991). “Communicative Language Teaching: State of the Art”.  TESOL Quarterly, 25(2: 261-277.
- Skjaervo, P. O., 2003.  An Introduction to Manichaean Sogdian, https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~iranian/Sogdian/sogdiancomplete.pdf
(تاریخ مراجعه به سایت: 24/08/1399)
- Skjaervo, P. O., 2003. An Introduction to Old Persian, https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~iranian/OldPersian/OPers1_Intro.pdf
(تاریخ مراجعه به سایت: 24/08/1399)
- Skjaervo, P. O., 2003.  Introduction to Young Avestan, https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~iranian/Avesta/avestancomplete.pdf
(تاریخ مراجعه به سایت: 24/08/1399)
- Skjærvø, P. O. (2005-2006). “The Importance of Orality for the Study of Old Iranian Literature and Myth”, Nāme-ye Irān-e Bāstān, 5(1&2):9-31.

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics