Criteria of Simplification of Old Literary Texts: A Case Study of Kelile and Demne

Classic literary texts are of special cultural importance. Although Persian speakers still can read and understand these old texts after hundreds of years, for the younger generation and recent Persian learner is hardly possible due to lexical and slightly syntactic changes. Therefore, many of these texts have been simplified for children and even adults. This research tries to compare some stories of Kelile and Demne with their simplified versions to examine the changes of the literary text through the process of simplification, and at the same time, to extract patterns of simplification. The reason for picking up Kelile and Demne is that on the one hand, it is one of the technical and ornate literary texts in Persian, and on the other hand, it is recurrently simplified. In this research, changes have been classified in four levels of morphology, syntax, lexicon and text. As result, three different approaches to the mechanism of simplification of old literary texts of Persian were observed: The tendency to keep both the content and the form of the original text The tendency to keep the content unchanged, but manipulate the form of the original text The tendency to manipulate both the content and the form of the original text Thus, the form has been always under change. The maipulations can be grouped into four levels of lexical, morphological, syntactic and textual changes.