Pathology of Schools and Universities Prosody Textbooks

In the textbooks of prosody of schools and universities of the country, from the years after the Islamic Revolution until now, there has been a special method that is different from the traditional method of prosody. Taghi Vahidian Kamyar and Sirus Shamisa are two of the authors of these textbooks, whose books have played the most important role in teaching prosody in schools and universities over these years. Both of these authors, whose method is very close to each other, claim that their method is scientific and much simpler and more efficient than the traditional method. But since this method alone is not able to explain all the issues of prosody, they claim that they have combined this method with traditional method where necessary. Now, in this regard, the following questions are raised: Is the method adopted by these authors to teach prosody really a scientific, efficient and simple method and has it been able to solve all the problems of prosody and introduce students to Persian prosody completely? Is this method more efficient, accessible and convenient than the traditional method? Are the criticisms made by these authors on the traditional method correct? Has the method they have adopted really improved the traditional method or has it made it more complicated and difficult? Have these authors, as they have claimed, succeeded in combining the scientific method with the traditional method or not? In this speech, we have reviewed their books with a descriptive-analytical method and have shown that first of all, these two authors have accepted unconditionally the criticisms that some contemporary researchers such as Parviz Natel Khanlari, Masoud Farzad, Alul Saton and Abolhasan Najafi have made on traditional prosody and the suggestions that these researchers have made to improve the traditional method and they have followed them in their books while all these criticisms have not been appropriate and correct, and all these suggestions have not advanced in the direction of improving the traditional method. For example it has been appropriate and correct that they have placed the intersection on the basis of syllables instead of static and moving letters and have redefined foots and components of prosody on the basis of syllables, and have used the data of phonetics and phonology to explain prosodic issues and it has contributed to the simplification and accuracy of prosodic topics, but the efforts that these researchers have made with the intention of avoiding the complex issue of Zahafat from traditional method have not led to any success and have unnecessarily caused the proliferation of prosody components and the complexity of the meter classification method. Also, this acts have practically broken the relationships that the classes of meters have with each other in traditional prosody and have placed the bases of classification on the formal factors and disrupted the coherence of classification system. On the other hand, such acts of taste have caused an excessive increase in the number of prosody meters and confused the border of common and pleasant meters with rare and insignificant meters. In addition, in many cases, this critics have not been able to offer something better instead of the objections they made on the traditional method, and they have finally returned to the same things that they criticized. For example these researchers have said that only meters whose components are repetitive or alternating are balanced and they have tried very hard to scan all meters with repetitive or alternating components, but in the end they were forced to accept the meters that are intersected with three or four different components in their classification system. Secondly, in the places where these two authors have used the proposed new methods despite the traditional method, they have not explained basics and principles of these methods, and as a result, their words have come out without an introduction and vague. And it has caused students to wander. While the contents in the educational books should be cooked and tested and experienced and classic and approved by the professors of art. Any untested and unconsidered proposal does not deserve to be included in official textbooks. Thirdly, the method that these researchers have called scientific, in the other words, the method that is based on the data of phonetics and phonology, it is true that it is accurate and calculated, but it is very limited and undeveloped and incapable, and without the help of the traditional method cannot justify and explain many basic issues of prosody knowledge. While this two authors have claimed that wherever it was necessary, they returned to the traditional method and combined it with scientific method, not only did they not do this, but actually under pretext simplifying, many basic problems of prosody have been left unexplained and finally, they have referred the prosody students to the traditional books of prosody. It is obvious that if these prosody student were able to use the traditional resources of prosody on their own, they would no longer need a class, a lesson, a teacher and to get acquainted with a handful of raw and unconsidered suggestions. Fourthly, these authors have not correctly raised some prosody issues as required by their proposed method; for example, both authors have suggested that prosody students use Persian script for phonetic writing, while this task is actually difficult and causes many mistakes for beginners or, where they have placed the components of mozahaf in the row of the main prosody components, they have not counted these components completely so that the prosody learner is able to scan all the available meters, but they have only included the components that are in a small number of famous and widely used meters. As a result, these educational books cannot introduce the learners of prosody to all problems of prosodic knowledge and provide them with ground to master this literary knowledge and deal creatively with its problems.