Dr. Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh

During the years 1977 - 1982 as a 2nd course in addition to chemistry I studied oriental science at the Seminar for history and culture of the near east (OrS) of the university of Hamburg. It became my mental exercise in order not to end up locked in the nerd corner.

Inspired by my travels to Iran in the years 1970, 1971, 1973, 1974 and 1978 I had begun to study the Persian language (Farsi: فارسى). During nearly all the time my teacher at the University of Hamburg was the well respected Shahnameh expert Dr. Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh.

So not very surprisingly I started to work on Abul'l-Qasem Ferdowsi's Shahnameh after I had passed the initial lessons. The Iranian national epic Shahnameh, completed by A. Ferdowsi in the year 400 H. (1009-1010) is of central importance hat both for history und Culture des pre-Islamic Iran and for the Persian Language and Literature. Despite several attempts a convincing Edition of a German to Farsi dictionary was still missing. Dr. Khalegi-Motlaghs new edition is now published in 6 volumes plus another 2 volumes for the commentary.

Strongly encouraged by Dr. Khaleghi-Motlagh I created an inverted version of Fritz Wolff's [1] glossary of Shahnameh. It was meant to become the nucleus for a German to Persian dictionary. I will publish it here when the time has come. You may have a 1st look into a raw version already.

Being a Computer-Freak I couldn't help myself but had to let the routine work be done by the then Telefunken computer TR440 and the subsequent Siemens / Fujitsu of the Hamburg University data center.

Of course there was neither a Persian keyboard nor a printer capable to print Persian letters. For this reason I finally developed my own transcription and designed fonts for the output on a drum Plotter. I wrote the necessary programs initially in FORTRAN IV and FORTRAN 77, re-wrote them later in Turbo-Pascal and re-created them recently in Java. You may use my even later JavaScript (ECMAScript) version to easily generate your own Persian HTML symbols.

[1] Wolff, Fritz: Glossary on Ferdowsis Shahnameh : [Gift of the German empire on the occasion of the millennium celebration for the Persian poet & prince] / Fritz Wolff. - Hildesheim : Olms et al., ISBN 3-487-00834-3, [1][Text] . - Graphically reproduced re-print of the original edition Berlin 1935. - 1965. - XIII, 911 pages.

Links ...

     Dr. Khalegi's Publications,
     Encyclopaedia Iranica
     Derafsh-e Kavian, the legendary royal standard of the Sasanian kings.
     Wikipedia on Schahname
     Wikipedia on oriental studies
 

Horst Walther, Hamburg