How to Speak Persian

[SoroushPersepolisi]

Originally Posted by ozzy_fb

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

[Nimaa]

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.

[Captain Kimo]

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

[Captain Kimo]

Originally Posted by Mesch

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.

[Mesch]

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.

[SoroushPersepolisi]

Originally Posted by Captain Kimo

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

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

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

[Mesch]

Originally Posted by SoroushPersepolisi

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.

[FreddyB]

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

[Mesch]

Originally Posted by SoroushPersepolisi

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

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.

[Captain Kimo]

Originally Posted by SoroushPersepolisi

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

Well inshallah dar in kar mowaffag beshawid

[Big Abdul]

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

[Mesch]

Originally Posted by Captain Kimo

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 mck]

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!!!!

[Luke mck]

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 ...

[FreddyB]

Originally Posted by Mesch

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

[Captain Kimo]

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

[Mesch]

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

[gerraSPB]

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...

[SoroushPersepolisi]

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

[Big Abdul]

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