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One of the poorly studied Iranian languages is Gurgani, the extinct language of Gurgän, the Persian province at the southeastern corner of the Caspian Sea. Gurgän is situated north of the Alburz watershed and consists of the broad plains and valleys watered by the rivers Gurgän and Atrak. Throughout history, the provincial capital of Gurgän was the city of Gurgän; under the Safavids, however, the southwestern town of Astar äbäd gained prominence, and the province itself was constituted as that of Astar äbäd. The town of Astar äbäd was renamed Gurgän under Reza Shah Pahlavi, while the old town of Gurgän corresponds to the site of the present Gunbad-i Qäbüs. Dast-i Gurgän is now designated as "Turkmen Sahara" on the map, and, just to add to the confusion, the province itself has recently been renamed Gulistän "rose garden," apparently after the trend in the Islamic Republic to replace toponyms that sound pagan, in this case gurgän "wolves."
The only known extant documents in the Gurgani language are those associated with the Hurüfí sect of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Hence, Gurgani must have died out sometime after the fifteenth but certainly before the nineteenth century, for European travelers do not report anything distinctive about the language of Gurgän. The language shift came about through social and commercial interactions that affected the entirety of Iranian languages all over the plateau and ousted the dialects south of the Great Khurasan Road as well as Gurgani north of the Alburz.
As is the case for many other Iranian dialects, one can find individual words attributed to the province of Gurgän in medieval Persian texts and dictionaries. A few lexemes are cited in al-B mini's al-Saydana (Kiyä and Räsid: 69f.). In Zakhira-yi khwärazmsähi and al-Aghräz al-tibbiyya, two major medical and pharmaceutical reference works compiled by Zayn al-Din Ismäfil Jurjäni, the author cites several words, mostly flora and fauna terms, from his hometown Gurgän (Qäsimi 2004). A manuscript of Das tur al-adwiya, a fourteenth-century drugprescription dictionary, cites three plant names from Gurgän (Sädiqi 2002: 40), most likely quoted from Jurjäni. Nevertheless, these words alone say little about the language of Gurgän with which they are identified; the...