Remarks on a Number of Ambiguous Words in the Oldest Tūmār-i Naqqālī

The oldest known Tūmār (‘scroll’, ‘prompt-book’) of Naqqālī (epic oral storytelling or, literally, ‘transmission’) (dated 1035 H. Q. /1626 A. D.) is a well-preserved manuscript now in the Minovi Library in Tehran. As its date of transcription suggests, the manuscript belongs to Safavid period. A cursory survey of the text reveals certain textual peculiarities that may interest linguists and lexicographers from variety of critical standpoints. For instance, there one encounters a number of words in this Tūmār, fifty-three to be precise, which are absent from similar texts as well as from dictionaries. Some of these terms are extremely puzzling and their probable meaning cannot be easily understood from the context. Some of them are Turkish words, again, not found in the Persian dictionaries. The article offers a listof these words, citing the passages in which they occur. It also briefly alludes to certain uncommon grammatical features of the text that may interest historical grammarians. Samples of the terms indexed in the article are: تن ناك، توجق، دبلقه، زول، طربزه، فروز، کورو، واسیه