This study examines different aspects of English lexical borrowings in New Persian, their phonetic adaptation, semantic changes, and social attitudes towards them (i.e. tensions between the prescriptive stand of language purists and the community, especially the young people of Tehran). It is based on the corpus of c. 340 words collected from dictionaries of Modern and colloquial Persian, media, spoken language sources, and data assembled from the Persian Internet sites.

Published for the fi rst time in 1721, Persian Letters has been relatively underestimated as a source of knowledge about Montesquieu’s philosophy of liberty. This paper analyses one of the main story lines of the novel, namely the relations between Usbek, the Persian traveller, and the wives remaining in his seraglio. It is demonstrated that these wives are in fact the fi gures of subjects — the fl attering and scheming subject of an absolute ruler, the law-abiding subject of a monarch, and the rebel who questions the very legitimacy of the lord’s authority. It is also demonstrated that the story of the seraglio wives’ rebellion explains why subjects rebel and how the rulers who abuse their power lose it.

It is essential for oceanographers to study the effects of marine phenomena such as currents, surface mixed layer, eddies, internal waves, and other ocean features on acoustic propagation, as most marine measurement equipment operates on this basis, like sonar. The eddy impact on acoustic transmission in the marine environment is very significant because changes in temperature and salinity disrupt the sound speed due to the presence of eddy, thus the acoustic propagation in the sea. Although cold eddies are in the Persian Gulf widely, one eddy is selected to study their impacts on acoustic propagation because they have similar properties in terms of temperature and salinity. In this research, after identifying eddies in the Persian Gulf automatically, the effect of a cold eddy on acoustic propagation was investigated at different depths using the BELLHOP model. Most eddies are cyclonic with 5–10 km of radius based on algorithm outputs. Studies on the lifespan of eddies showed that the occurrence of cyclonic eddies with a lifespan of more than three days is more than anticyclonic ones. Examination of the eddy effect on acoustic propagation showed that the transmission loss (TL) during the progress of the acoustic wave across the eddy increases with increasing the depth of the sound source. Also, the presence of cold eddy compared to the conditions it does not exist increases the transmission loss. The study of three-dimensional acoustic propagation also confirmed the obtained results in two-dimensional mode and clearly showed the role of cold eddy in increasing the TL.

The student of Ottoman Empire always keeps a watchful eye open for the rare, sometimes unique record which has somehow survived from the heyday of Ottoman historiography or archival treasuries and illuminates an aspect of history otherwise unknown to us. One such records concerns is the Book VI of Hašt Bihišt, written by Idrīs Bidlīsī (1457–1520), who is undoubtedly one of the most original and important intellectual figures in the Ottoman-Iranian borderland in the sixteenth-century. This paper deals with critical edition and translation of an unpublished tahniyat-nāma, given in Hašt Bihišt VI, which Bidlīsī dedicated to the first marriage of Mehmed II.

The 13th-century Persian poet Saʿdi from Shiraz is considered to be one of the most prominent representatives of medieval Persian ethical literature. His works full of moralizing anecdotes were well known and widely read not only in Persia, but in the other parts of the Islamic world as well. Due to his highly humanistic approach, the relations between people were one of the most important issues discussed by the poet. This article is an attempt to define the status of ‘speech’ in Saʿdi’s moral imagination and to show how it becomes a key instrument in shaping relations with others. In the poet’s opinion, the right words reasonably spoken, just like an appropriate silence, shape the relationship between people and help them avoid conflict and open dispute. Quarrels and confrontations, according to the poet, not only damage a person literally by exposing his flaws and imperfections of character, thereby compromising his reputation (aberu), but may also undermine the basis of social life, generating hostility between people. That is why Saʿdi urges his readers to use soft and gentle speech in dealing with people and always behave in a conciliatory manner in response to aggression and rudeness. Highlighting the moral aspect of speech, Saʿdi shows how kind words form an invisible veil between people, which should be preserved if man desires to maintain his image, good name and dignity.