Gilbert Lazard: Linguist and Iranologist (Paris, 4 February 1920–Paris, 6 September 2018)

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Notes

1 A state-funded institute of higher education designed to train academics to serve in the French public education system.

2 Pierre-Aimé Touchard (1903‒87), French writer and theatre administrator, and a member of the resistance against the German occupation during World War II. The “Maison des Lettres,” a center for students in the humanities, became a hub for the French Resistance movement under Touchard’s guidance.

3 See M. Lazard, “Vois se pencher les défuntes années”: Souvenirs du XXe siècle (Paris: de Fallois, 2016).

4 The French competitive examination for civil service in the French public education system.

5 Lazard, “Vois se pencher les défuntes années”: Souvenirs du XXe siècle, p. 110.

6 V. Monteil, Le Persan contemporain. Textes et vocabulaires (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1954).

7 Lazard, “Vois se pencher les défuntes années”: Souvenirs du XXe siècle, p. 145.

8 Although issued in unrelated publications, the EVLIA (Études sur la versification dans les langues irano-aryennes) were all duly identified and numbered by Lazard. They have recently been translated into Persian and collected in a single volume that Lazard himself helped revise: G. Lazard, Barresi-e vazn-e sheʿr-e Irāni, trans. L. Ziamajidi (Tehran: Hermes, 1395/2016).

9 G. Lazard, La Formation de la langue persane (Paris: Peeters, 1995), p. 15 ; G. Lazard, The Origins of Literary Persian (Bethesda, MD: Foundation for Iranian Studies, 1993) is the published version of a conference, also available online: https://fis-iran.org/en/programs/noruzlectures/literary-persian.

10 The Sorbonne nouvelle was created after the split of the University of Paris, in the aftermath of the events of May 1968. See G. Lazard, “Histoire de l’Institut d’études iraniennes,” in È. Pierunek and Y. Richard, eds., Louis Massignon et l’Iran (Louvain-Paris: Peeters, 2000), pp. 7‒11.

11 The Bibliothèque universitaire des langues et civilisations was inaugurated in 2011, on the new premises of the Institut national des langues et civilisations, rue des Grands Moulins, in the 13th arrondissement in Paris.

12 See G. Lazard, F. Grenet and C. de Lamberterie, “Notes bactriennes,” Studia Iranica 13, no. 2 (1984), pp. 198‒232.

13 Actancy, otherwise known as “morphosyntactic alignment,” identifies the grammatical relationship between arguments in the sentence, specifically, between the verb—transitive or intransitive—the subject and the object. On the research team RIVALC (Recherches interlinguistiques sur les variations d’actance et leurs corrélats), see: http://lacito.vjf.cnrs.fr/actances/ and G. Lazard, L’actance (Paris: PUF, 1994) ; English trans.: Actancy (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998).

14 G. Lazard, “Esquisse de typologie actancielle des langues du Caucase,” in Eurotyp 2: Actance et Valence dans les Langues de l’Europe, ed. Jack Feuillet (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 939‒960.

15 Anthologie de la poésie persane (XIe‒XXe siècles) (Paris: Gallimard/UNESCO, 1964).

16 An international tribute appeared in 1989, edited by C.-H. de Fouchecour and P. Gignoux: Études irano-aryennes offertes à Gilbert Lazard (Louvain-Paris: Peeters, 1989; Studia Iranica, Cahier 7). A full list of Gilbert Lazard’s publications up until 2011 can be found in A. H. Ibrahim, ed., Du persan à la typologie. L’apport de Gilbert Lazard (Paris: Faits de langue—Ophrys, 2011).