kicking out foreign words i am 100% on it
ive become addicted to finding persian equivalents and allways speak as much pure as i can

Is this even possible? when I listen to persian its like 25% arabic words

^^ hahaha yeah right....

Is this even possible? when I listen to persian its like 25% arabic words

How do you know that most of those words you think are Arabic aren't actually Persian loanwords into Arabic?:tongue2:

Is this even possible? when I listen to persian its like 25% arabic words

its fully possible mate, ottoman turkish has so much persian and arabic that i could read and understand it, but look at modern turkish, its much more filtered

a report showed that in street talk, persian has about 16% arabic, and in formal thick fluff language up to 25%, the sad thing is that almost all those words have persian equivalents,and the islamic regime likes the usage of more and more arabic (what do u expect from mullahs?), in some writings theres is none, eg the peoples' national anthem (ey iran) the whole is pure persian
anyhow, there are also lots of persian terms in arabic, but the thing is that when they enter arabic they become so glossed many arabs and even persians dont recognize the origin of the word, where as in persian the arabic words are a bit changed for persian comfort but still is obvious its persian

Is this even possible? when I listen to persian its like 25% arabic words

Don't show your ignorance about the subject
For every Arabic word used in modern day Persian, we have our own Persian one. For some reason that I never really understood though, these arabic words are used instead of the Persian ones. Unfortunately our Islamic regime even promotes the use of these arabic words to an extent.

Take "thank you" for example. Most people use the following words: Merci, mamnoon, tashakor, moteshakeram etc... However we have a PERFECTLY fine Persian word for thank you and it's perfectly acceptable, which is "sepas". Some time in our history the word fell out of favour and we're still using the arabic/french ones. This is the same story with all the arabic words. We're in a unique position of not even having to invent words to purify our language! WE ALREADY HAVE our own words and we're not using them. Very weird.

@ soroush:
off-topic question.but where did u find ottoman turkish words?I'm curious to read some

i have samples of ottoman poetry, its limited though
i also have read various writings and early republic poetry which was still fairly ottoman , its realy cool

age name in neveshte haro peyda kardam midam
ziad nistan

thanks.age peyda kardi mail kon ;)

Arabic words are "treasury" of persian. Arabic is unique, strong "masculine" language, persian is beautiful "feminine" language, more poetic. So they are complimentary.

its fully possible mate, ottoman turkish has so much persian and arabic that i could read and understand it, but look at modern turkish, its much more filtered



And this is a disaster for modern turkish, as well as latin script. But recently new government promoting some changes in westernization and secular politics in language, I hope there will be return to arabic script in Turkey, as it was in Ottoman empire.

but I love it when Persians pronounce Arabic-origin words.. :(

Honestly though, I see no point in one trying to "purify" their language aside from the possible delusional jingoistic pleasure that they may derive from doing so.

In the case of Persian and Arabic, contrary to what many think Arabic and Persian have been exchanging loanwords and expressions for quite an extended period of time, going back to Pre-Islamic Arabia. Both languages have influenced and enriched eachother considerably and I can't imagine Arabic without Persian loanwords and a Farsi free of Arabic influence/loanwords is one that would take a lot of time for me to get used to.

but I love it when Persians pronounce Arabic-origin words.. :(

haha :)

love it when i watch arabic comentary on persian v arab teams, bersebolis fc and bejman instead of pezhman ;)


Honestly though, I see no point in one trying to "purify" their language aside from the possible delusional jingoistic pleasure that they may derive from doing so.

In the case of Persian and Arabic, contrary to what many think Arabic and Persian have been exchanging loanwords and expressions for quite an extended period of time, going back to Pre-Islamic Arabia. Both languages have influenced and enriched eachother considerably and I can't imagine Arabic without Persian loanwords and a Farsi free of Arabic influence/loanwords is one that would take a lot of time for me to get used to.

^^ well thats true in general
theres no major "benefit"
its the fact of pleasure and "delight of using ones' own produce", speaking with something of one's self
in some cases it might be a bit simpler and easier to use native terms but in general its mostly an emotional thing

languages enrichen each other , the perso-arab relation is a vivid example, not only im words but in script development and literarure as a whole

as you said, unwinding loanwords is a long process that can take even a few generation for the effect to be seen

And this is a disaster for modern turkish, as well as latin script. But recently new government promoting some changes in westernization and secular politics in language, I hope there will be return to arabic script in Turkey, as it was in Ottoman empire.

the perso-arabic script wont return, if it does it will make everything shift for a generation or two

mano bebin ke daram ba ki harf mizanam :)

^^
i wouldn't change the Persian,Turkish, Kurdish and other languages influence in Arabic for the world , it will be soulless, fake and artificial :)

i could live without the ugly hybrid English words that came during the oil boom and before :)

^^ Exactly. Such attempts are, in my opinion, akin to purifying English of its heavy French influence which would be considered by the majority of linguists today as absurd.

haha :)

love it when i watch arabic comentary on persian v arab teams, bersebolis fc and bejman instead of pezhman ;)


I'm afraid you misunderstood. I wasn't talking about Persians mispronouncing Arabic words (or vice versa), I was talking about the Arabic loanwords that were incorporated into Persian vocab a long time ago and whose original "mispronunciation" has been standardized into being the norm today.

For example, when I wrote that post I was coincidentally listening to Googoosh's "Taghdeer" which, originally in Arabic, is pronounced "Ta(q)deer" but I thought it sounded lovely, of clear Arabic origin, yet in the meantime very Persian.

@ soroush:
off-topic question.but where did u find ottoman turkish words?I'm curious to read some

i have samples of ottoman poetry, its limited though
i also have read various writings and early republic poetry which was still fairly ottoman , its realy cool

age name in neveshte haro peyda kardam midam
ziad nistan

From the Travelogue of Evliya Celebi - 17th century Ottoman Turkish...

http://i42.tinypic.com/313lhk1.jpg

You can download all volumes of the travelogue for free from the link below if you're interested...

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=evliyaelebisey


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evliya_Celebi


From Tarih-i Cevdet of Ahmet Cevdet Pasha- 19th century Ottoman Turkish...

http://i39.tinypic.com/11sz62t.jpg

http://www.archive.org/

Can you guys undestand anything?


I think in Iran only Iranian Azeris may be able to understand Ottoman Turkish...

I'm afraid you misunderstood. I wasn't talking about Persians mispronouncing Arabic words (or vice versa), I was talking about the Arabic loanwords that were incorporated into Persian vocab a long time ago and whose original "mispronunciation" has been standardized into being the norm today.

For example, when I wrote that post I was coincidentally listening to Googoosh's "Taghdeer" which, originally in Arabic, is pronounced "Ta(q)deer" but I thought it sounded lovely, of clear Arabic origin, yet in the meantime very Persian.

well yes i know
but at that instant i could find specific persian words in arabic that are pronounced in a similar fashion to persian,
so i mentioned name reading
i knew what u ment

eg , i allways thought deen (religion) , adyan , ... were arabic, it seemed so perfectly placed, until i found out the persian origin!
oh how facinating the world of language is

btw theres another song named "taghdir" by "shadmehr aghili" its nice :)

^^
i wouldn't change the Persian,Turkish, Kurdish and other languages influence in Arabic for the world , it will be soulless, fake and artificial :)

i could live without the ugly hybrid English words that came during the oil boom and before :)

^^ Exactly. Such attempts are, in my opinion, akin to purifying English of its heavy French influence which would be considered by the majority of linguists today as absurd.

well french and english is a bit different, both are indo-eurpean, and both have strong influence from latin, whereas french is even a italic romance language, being a cousin of latin

the amount of words switched in european languages especially between romance and germanic languages is soo extreme and interwined its impossible, aside, there arent mamy replacements, as the languages grew together

persian and arabic are of different roots and although they had contact since a long time ago, their relation is more of like the connection of branches of two separate trees, arabic words are clearly visible in persian, and easily picked

arabic is a lovely language and its literature and grammer is strong, the fact that persian has a decent amount of arabic loans also makes us to be able to be familiar to arabic text and actually understand a bit, which i think is really cool :)
but,
the thing is that if u listen to the iranian news u see that over the years the use of arabic words for words that were never even used in arabic have increased to "islamize" persian , the government sadly glosses arabic with islam and thats what arabic is being protrayed to us, rather than the real arabic in a purely cultural and linguistic form


with the forced laws in iran, the people have distanced themselves from this and alot of these ideas about language have been growing in the years

although it does stress me sometimes and i get very sensitive in the words i or others use, i have become paranoid about the usage of loanwords
but all in all i dont mind that that much. as long as the arabic words are the arabic words that have naturally entered persian, not the ones forced by the authorities that half of which we dont understand
anyhow some words have been fully fused in , like salam
some words though like sharaab , wine, we have "mey" and "baadeh", its just a bit awkward in a sense, like having gas in ur car and asking other drivers for petrol
man im rolling with these analogies

the issue however is not just language, theres alot of other things in the background of this

man that was a huge ass response :D

From the Travelogue of Evliya Celebi - 17th century Ottoman Turkish...

You can download all volumes of the travelogue for free from the link below if you're interested...

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=evliyaelebisey

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evliya_Celebi

From Tarih-i Cevdet of Ahmet Cevdet Pasha- 19th century Ottoman Turkish...

http://www.archive.org/

Can you guys undestand anything?

I think in Iran only Iranian Azeris may be able to understand Ottoman Turkish...

wow! one of the things ive read was exactly bits and pieces of celebi's travelogue! thnks for the sites
cox sagol

The thing is, we already have our own words for the Arabic words that we're using! Using our own words is not the same as trying to "purify" the language by coming up with new "Persian" words. We already have our own words and they are perfectly acceptable. We use them in poetry, we read them in the Shaname etc... so why not try and use them? This is what I don't get.

Sometimes I'm talking and I say an Arabic word and immidietly think to myself "why did I say ... when I could have used ..."! We need to start replacing these arabic words with our own. If we didn't already have our own words than I wouldn't be bitching, but that's not the case.

^^ قبل از هر جيز اسهايتان را كه اغلب عربى هستند تغيير دهد بعد در مورد حذف كلمات عربى حرف بزنيد

فراموش نكن قبلا خيلى سعى كردند اين كار را بكنند ولى موفق نشدند

Honestly though, I see no point in one trying to "purify" their language aside from the possible delusional jingoistic pleasure that they may derive from doing so..

Patriotic persians are vey senstive when it comes to arabic. For them its the language of the arab invaders and the religion that destroyed their persian civilization (according to them). I don't think they would give a damn if those words were loaned from another language.

^^ that's why i called it "delusional jingoistic pleasure" because all languages exchange and borrow lexicons and even syntactical features sometimes. that's what they do. regardless of the historical "misdeeds" that might be associated with such processes.

^^ ??? ?? ?? ??? ???????? ?? ?? ???? ???? ????? ????? ??? ??? ?? ???? ??? ????? ???? ??? ?????

?????? ??? ???? ???? ??? ????? ??? ??? ?? ????? ??? ???? ?????

nimi az vazhe haye be kar bordat arabi bud :)
bayad ham naamo inaro hamaro baham tagheer bedeem

well yes i know
but at that instant i could find specific persian words in arabic that are pronounced in a similar fashion to persian,
so i mentioned name reading
i knew what u ment

eg , i allways thought deen (religion) , adyan , ... were arabic, it seemed so perfectly placed, until i found out the persian origin!
oh how facinating the world of language is

btw theres another song named "taghdir" by "shadmehr aghili" its nice :)

If you know Arabic, here's a little tip that might help you figure out what words are borrowed and vis-a-vis understand better the impact Persian had on Arabic:

Whenever a word's plural form is irregular (called Takseer in Arabic), the word is usually borrowed. :)

you mean if the "jam3" of a word is "jam3e mokassar" the word is originally NOT Arabic?
Like "kotob","a7val",..?

well french and english is a bit different, both are indo-eurpean, and both have strong influence from latin, whereas french is even a italic romance language, being a cousin of latin

the amount of words switched in european languages especially between romance and germanic languages is soo extreme and interwined its impossible, aside, there arent mamy replacements, as the languages grew together

persian and arabic are of different roots and although they had contact since a long time ago, their relation is more of like the connection of branches of two separate trees, arabic words are clearly visible in persian, and easily picked

arabic is a lovely language and its literature and grammer is strong, the fact that persian has a decent amount of arabic loans also makes us to be able to be familiar to arabic text and actually understand a bit, which i think is really cool :)
but,
the thing is that if u listen to the iranian news u see that over the years the use of arabic words for words that were never even used in arabic have increased to "islamize" persian , the government sadly glosses arabic with islam and thats what arabic is being protrayed to us, rather than the real arabic in a purely cultural and linguistic form


with the forced laws in iran, the people have distanced themselves from this and alot of these ideas about language have been growing in the years

although it does stress me sometimes and i get very sensitive in the words i or others use, i have become paranoid about the usage of loanwords
but all in all i dont mind that that much. as long as the arabic words are the arabic words that have naturally entered persian, not the ones forced by the authorities that half of which we dont understand
anyhow some words have been fully fused in , like salam
some words though like sharaab , wine, we have "mey" and "baadeh", its just a bit awkward in a sense, like having gas in ur car and asking other drivers for petrol
man im rolling with these analogies

the issue however is not just language, theres alot of other things in the background of this

man that was a huge ass response :D

Nice post! :)

Well, I'm generally against any forced change on a language. I think I now get what you mean and I understand and support you fully.


As for the difference between Arabic and Persian,

Funny you should say; I actually just came out of a lecture that's part of a course on Spanish dialects and the lecturer was speaking of the influence the indigenous American languages had on the Spanish spoken there. He mentioned Quechua, an indigenous language, that shares 30% of its vocabulary with another indigenous language called Aymara. The languages however hail from completely different language families but share so much vocab as a result of millennia-old contact. The relationship between those two languages summarizes exactly what I think of the relationship between Persian and Arabic.

nimi az vazhe haye be kar bordat arabi bud :)
bayad ham naamo inaro hamaro baham tagheer bedeem

Well inshallah dar in kar mowaffag beshawid :cheers:

I tell you, learning Farsi from scratch is bloody killing me. It really is dificult, when working in Iran as well is an issue.

Are we talking about the same language here? lol. Anyway I don't think this is the best thread to discuss arabic grammar.

Tayyeb. I have a question, how hard was it for you to learn Farsi? I'm thinking of taking Persian next term and I'd appreciate the feedback from a native speaker of Arabic.

Luke here.. I'am back now... And I have found out that Persian is more confusing then I realised..Oh no' What am I going to do??? It seems like every word changes according to the word next to it. Or something like that..Frig!!!!

Soroush..!! Can you help me some more??..Please Soroush :) And thank you for your past lessons.. I think you may have helped me with Mozhgan.. So thanks lots ...:)

Tayyeb. I have a question, how hard was it for you to learn Farsi? I'm thinking of taking Persian next term and I'd appreciate the feedback from a native speaker of Arabic.

I'm not an Arabic speaker but Farsi's grammer is alot more simple than Arabic,therefor I think it won't be much hard

^^ Exactly.
And for an arab speaker its much more easier since Arabic and Persian share a lot of vocabularies.

Nice! Thank you, both. I'm excited for the term to begin now. :)

Hey guy. You have a really rich and ancient culture. But I don't understand one think. Why don't you have your own alphabet, writing system? May something like Avestian? I think Arabic script inconvenient for Persian, because of consonance type of writing...

thanks for the complement however,
why doesnt russia have their own? why do you use a greek derived alphabet?
cultures influence eachother you see

firstly, all (most) of the world's western alphabets (also near east) come from pheonecian, and its ancestors, greek, latin, arabic, persian etc

the old persian alphabets where heavily borrowed and influenced by their pheonician ancestors, and aramaic (which are of the same language), the persians created their own alphabets based on the people of the time, dont forget that many syrians, aramaic and near eastern people all blended in iran, and iran's script was an offspring of this connection, avestan and pahlevi scripits are rooted in aramaic and pheonician, just like how greek , latin etc did, later the arabs (mostly from the hijaz region in arabia) had developed the kufi script which was a child of syriac, a cousin script of avestan, and when they attacked iran, the newer kufi script was introduced, however, after years of influence both from the arab side and the persian side, the modern script was born , for example the connection of letters and some other structural elements are clearly pahlavi styled, and vis versa, arab influences are vivid, if you compare avestan, pahlavi , kufi, syriac and modern perso-arabic you see the very strong similarity

so why change something that is so strongly rooted in our own culture and our neighbor's?

and the script fits perfectly with persian, since the languages grew together, and we have made the script form into our language, they complement eachother

contrary to popular belief, the script is also persian in the way it is very arab

I would be open to the idea that farsi should do the Turkey route. And save the Perso Arabic script for Koran.

I would be open to the idea that farsi should do the Turkey route. And save the Perso Arabic script for Koran.

you know the cost, amount of lost heritage etc that would cause

i would certainly like an officialized latin script for persian, to use internationally, online or in the industry but a total switch... its not good
many of my turkish friends like the latin alphabet but also hate how they arent able to read many old turkish things, also, the perso arabic alphabet entered turkish as a fully foreign thing, the same was not the case for iran

anyway

there is a whole thread for this if you search, a once very live thread where people from all over the site had arguments on lol

I would be open to the idea that farsi should do the Turkey route. And save the Perso Arabic script for Koran.

I disagree. Not only it has been in our country for 14 centuries, but I also find it more beautiful and engaging for the eye. I personally hate it when people write in Pinglish, hard to read if it is more than 2 sentence. :nuts:

I disagree. Not only it has been in our country for 14 centuries, but I also find it more beautiful and engaging for the eye. I personally hate it when people write in Pinglish, hard to read if it is more than 2 sentence. :nuts:

I think exactly the opposite.

However, it is true that Pinglish is ugly because, people use the same latin letters that arabs use to write their language ("kh", "gh", "q", "oo"...)

While beautiful and of historical importance, the abjad is functionally inferior to a proper alphabet. English would be a bad example because it is highly irregular, but compared to a language like Spanish it is not as good because the short vowels are rarely written. Relics of the past are maintained in the script, including some silent letters and Arabic forms, which in some cases have different pronunciation from native Persian.

If using a word like "گرفتن" as an example, the first time I see this word as a non-native speaker I basically see "grftn" if translated to Latin script. I may know the last letter is "a" because verbs end that way, but the other letters are a complete guessing game.

I admit that this argument could be considered irrelevant because it is a language mainly used by native speakers, so knowing the vowels is pretty obvious. I will say however, that people too often equate certain traditions with some kind of moral value. Changing the script of a language shouldn't be equated with loss of cultural identity, a script is simply a construct of man to express the words he or she says, and shouldn't be overvalued.