Whether you follow or scorn the community of fanfic writers, the fact remains that cross cultural interactions can bring, if not new colors, at least novel hues to the picture.
So for a ficlet of post canon I had the protagonists travel all the way back east and speak Persian for a few short sentences before they would, inevitably, change into English.
The conversation above is the whole discussion raising bit which not only challenged this writer whether to bring the actual words or just the transcriptions but also reminded me how people of other languages easily mistake Persian for Arabic.
So here are few prominent points you need to know about Persian (Farsi) and most importantly, that it is not of the same language family as Arabic, despite the borrowed alphabet.
Persian is actually from the family of Indo-European languages such as English and you can easily find lexical similarities like for the word brother in English, which in Persian is baraadar, almost identical.
The grammar is also based on far easier rules, if you don’t mind me saying so, in comparison and for example there are no rules regarding genders. There is just one pronoun of third person singular (oo) to talk about any entity, be it a person, an animal or a thing.
Also, if you are using the word Iran to talk about the area, please mind the pronunciation is not like I-ran. Although it seems a lot of Persians are running away from the county. It's ee-raan, meaning the land of Aria (nobel).
Modern speaking Persians of Iran have a lot of loan words from three major sources, chronologically, Arabic (salam, meaning hello), French (maman, meaning mom) and of course English (computer and many other tech. words). But it always adds its own pronunciation.
For example the Arabic word salam sounds like salaam with a long a sound, which interestingly can be even elongated to show enthusiasm (salaaam!).
Or another loan word, such as (aks) from Arabic meaning opposite, can also mean photograph in Persian when it doesn't have the same function in the mother language.
All in all, Persian sounds closer to French with 32 letters of the alphabet and a variety of deep sounds similar to gh in Dutch for example or the r in French.
It is also worth mentioning that in the geography of the language, including Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan you may hear such different accents that to a foreigner they might resemble a different language at first.
For instance, in a tourist attraction of Isfehan, you may hear the phrase, “Chitury dada?” meaning “How are you bro?” and you might rightfully notice the word ‘dada’ (no, it doesn’t mean nonsense) has nothing to share with the formal Persian word of brother (baraadar).
Also bear in mind that all the explanations given above deal with the official language of the country. Meanwhile there are other languages spoken in areas such as Kurdistan (Kurdi), Hormozgan (Arabic) and Azerbaijan (Turkish) to name a few. But if your trip is limited to major cities, rest assured that everybody speaks Persian and many of the younger people easily understand English.
#Persian, #Persia, #Farsi
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