Rare Optatives in Shahnameh

Although many years have passed since its inception, the critical correction of Shahnameh, as one of the greatest literary and epic works of Iran and the world, has a long way to go. The vast volume of this great work and the wide variety of the issues presented in it, alongside its language antiquity, require that in order to reach as close as possible to the poet’s original creation, all the stories, verses and words of it be reviewed and reexamined and scholars with various specialties and approaches comment on its various aspects. From the grammatical pint of view, this article discusses some verses from different parts of Shahnameh. The commonality of these verses is in their optative verbs. In the first part, the pronoun-constructed verbs of Shahnameh are discussed. The second part introduces a rare verb construction in which the optative morpheme of the third person singular is ‘iyi’. The last part is about the optative form of bāyistan “have to, must” which requires an enclitic pronoun complement in some of its constructions. These parts were studied and analyzed by measuring the recordings of the manuscripts and by analyzing the previous readings. In the case of pronoun-constructed verbs, the form ending in ‘ti’ was suggested everywhere, and in the other two cases, based on the manuscript recordings and relying on grammatical points, the correctness of the readings presented before the publication by Khaleghi Motlagh, was emphasized.