Linguistic and Literary Notes (5): Notes on Abū Nuwās’ Fārisiyyāt ‘Perso-Arabic Macaronic Verses’

This paper is based on my master’s dissertation, which I have recently defended at University of Tehran (Tabibzadeh 2025). The dissertation provides a thorough discussion of Perso-Arabic macaronic verses (also known as Fārisiyyāt) attributed to Abū Nuwās (c.a. 8th-9th CE), focusing mostly on data relevant to Persian historical linguistics, and presents a critical edition of over 240 such couplets. This edition is based on numerous and significant manuscripts of the Dīwān, including its three well-known 10th-century recensions (see Wagner 1956, 1), and  the critical edition of the Dīwān of Abū Nuwās by Ewald Wagner and Gregor Schoeler (Abū Nuwās 1972-2006) as well. In the dissertation, each couplet is accompanied by a Persian translation, and the ambiguities and the difficulties of some couplets are elucidated in the commentary. The present paper consists of two parts: in the first part, I discuss the history of the use of the term Fārisiyyāt to refer Arabic texts -mostly poetic but also prose texts- that features Persian linguistic elements -such as words, phrases and sentences- embedded in the Arabic context. It is shown that there is no attestation of the word Fārisiyyah (pl. Fārisiyyāt) in medieval Arabic and Persian texts as a term referring to such macaronic texts, and instead, Fārisiyyah/Fārisiyyāt simply designates the Persian language itself, or Persian words, or works composed in Persian. In fact, it was Mojtaba Minovi (1954) who used Fārisiyyāt for the first time as a term for Abū Nuwās’ macaronic verses. After Minovi, this term, which could now refer to any Perso-Arabic macaronic poetic or prose text, became so common among both Iranian and Western scholars that its origin was forgotten. It was even occasionally considered a traditional term in Arabic literature. It is noteworthy that the term Fārisiyyah/Fārisiyyāt in this recent meaning (i.e. Perso-Arabic macaronic texts), denotes Arabic literary works containing non-Arabic linguistic elements that were taken not only from early New Persian, but also from other Iranian language such as Middle Persian and Sogdian. Thus, the term has a similar denotation to the general meaning of the word Fārisiyyah in the Medieval Arabic texts, as well as the medieval Persian texts influenced by Arabic sources, where Fārisiyyah denotes ANY Iranian language spoken by Persians and NOT ONLY New Persian -or the same al-dariyyah or Darī- (I owe this point to dear Professor Ali Ashraf Sadeghi). In the second part, I analyze the structure of Perso-Arabic macaronic verses in Arabic poetry, focusing on those composed by Abū Nuwās, and introduce two types of the macaronic verses distinguished based on the way that the Persian elements are embedded in their Arabic context. Furthermore, I discus some motivations for composing Perso-Arabic macaronic verses and finally, provide some data from Abū Nuwās’ macaronics significant for Persian historical linguistics.