page 542 note 1 The material on which the following remarks on Baḵẖtiāri verse are based was collected by me in Kerman just at the beginning of the First World War, between the middle of July and the middle of September, 1914.
At that time Kerman had a Baḵẖtiāri Governor, Ghulām Husain Khān, Sardār Muḥtasham, whose authority was supported by a body of two or three hundred Baḵẖtiāri sowars. After several disappointments I found among his followers a very able and keen informant, Mullā, Ilāhi, who was able from his own resources and those of his companions to supply nearly 2,800 lines of Baḵẖtiāri verse. I had no time to work through and revise this material with him as I then left Persia for good and, consequently, I have only the insufficient notes that I was able to make as I recorded it.
I also obtained from Mullā Ilāhi a large number of prose texts, on many subjects, to add to a few collected from other people in 1906 and 1913. The whole amounts to 75,000 words. It will be realized that all this provides a very considerable vocabulary of the language.
When I started to collect Baḵẖtiāri verse I thought that I was doing more or less pioneer work. Earlier in 1914 I had, indeed, obtained a copy of Oskar Mann's Die Mundarten der Lur- Stämme im sudwestlichen Persien, published in Berlin in 1910, but the Baḵẖtiāri material which Mann presented was limited to about 60 lines of prose and 280 of verse.
In fact, however, the Russian V. A. Zhukovsky had in 1884–5 collected nearly 2,000 lines of Baḵẖtiāri verse, but this was not published till 1922, four years after his death. The title page bears the following: V. A. Zhukovsky. Materiali dlya Izucheniya Persidskikh Narechü. Chast Tretya. Narechie Bakhtiarov Chekharleng i Kheftleng, Vipusk Pervii. I. Teksti i Perevodi. II. Slovar. Petrograd. 1922.
It was published by order of the Russian Academy Nauk.
This work is probably now unobtainable. I owe my copy of it, as also that of Mann's book, to Professor V. Minorsky, a debt which I am very happy to have this opportunity of publicly acknowledging.
Zhukovsky's texts are given transliterated in Russian script and are accompanied by Russian translations. There is also a very thorough Baḵẖtiāri-Russian Vocabulary, in which references appear to be given to every occurrence of each word in the texts. There is, however, no introduction, and there are no explanatory notes. A brief note in Baḵẖtiāri states that the songs were collected and recorded by Zhukovsky and Mulla Nasrulla Baḵẖtiāri at Ispahan in 1302 A.H., and printed with Russian translations in Petersburg.
Mann, on the other hand, has an interesting introduction and some welcome notes. He also gives a very brief combined vocabulary of all the dialects illustrated, of which only about 120 words are marked as Baḵẖtiāri. Of these some are known neither to Zhukovsky nor to me, which shows that there is still much work to be done on the dialect.
