The real Omar Khayyam

The real Omar Khayyam. B. Csillik.
Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 10 (1960), p. 58-77.

Review of Arberry's edition of 1949.
This edition, as the Author-Editor himself tells us in his Introduction, had to fulfill the purpose of quickly presenting to the public, with a minimum of critical apparatus, the newly discovered facts in order to give share to others in the exciting work of further research. Beside the Introduction the book contains nothing but the printed text of the MS with the critical apparatus, the English versions and an alphabetical list of the quatrains. The Editor restored the dotted däl’s wherever the copyist omitted them by obvious inadvertency and — what the copyist did not even try to do — he distinguished the pä and gäf letters from the bä and käf letters. This peculiar employment of the däl, bä and käf letters speaks for the antiquity of the MS. The dots supplied by the Editor are not indicated, and this may be regretted in view of the potential hints which the presence or absence of the dots of the däl’s might have given to the student of phonology and linguistic history.

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