Recognition of Some Iranian Dialect Words through Goddess Kali

Names and words are essentially symbolic entities. They first originated in a time when myth and language were not yet detached. However, as time went by, the connection between names (words) and their referents started to fade away, leaving many words in language completely detached from their mythical origins. Most language symbols have thus largely lost their symbolic characteristics, if not fully. This study takes into account the common origin of myth and language and uses a mythological approach to examine name and word as symbols. The theoretical framework of the study is drawn from Cassirer’s theory on the primitive man’s way of thinking, which he terms the mythical thought. A comparative study between words in Iranian dialects and Indo-European words revealed that a range of objects and natural phenomena with distinct meaning but comparable forms were all associated by the people to Goddess Kālī, and thus were named after her.