Living in the past

[muckefuck]

Moving on to the Persian books now. (Yes, my Persian sucks, but know what? Everyone else's sucks much worse.) Who knew that the Islamic Republic didn't use the Islamic Calendar? Had I, it would've saved me ten minutes of trying to reconcile the 2002 publication date in the provisional with the 1961 date give by my A.H. to C.E. conversion tables.

Speaking of Persian, I suspect many of you have seen some version of the AP article on Iranian linguistic purism. I find it fairly frustrating that none of the reports I've seen--not even in the blogosphere--cite the actual words in question. I'm sure they're all there on the Persian Academy[*] website, but it's all in Persian so I'm hosed.

[*] a.k.a. Farhangistān-i Zabān-i Īrān. +10 points for consistency in the choice of a native coinage (farhangistān) to translate "academy" rather than following the example of the Hebrew and Welsh bodies.

Comments

[alcarilinque.livejournal.com]

Heh, no one actually wants to know what they're talking about. It probably just makes it easier to think they're crazy this way.

[tyrannio.livejournal.com]

What calendar system do they use, then?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Why, the Iranian calendar, naturally.

[wiped.livejournal.com]

i might be of some help with the persian, should you need it. i speak it decently, but my reading could use some improvement..

and there are SO many frustrating things with the western media's coverage of the persian academy's decision, i don't even know where to start. most frustratingly, i find myself arguing with people online on this issue often, and i hate having to side with the islamic republic, of which i'm not too fond.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

(1) Pretty much all reporting by the major media outlets on linguistic subjects sucks, as any faithful Language Log reader knows.

(2) Most major media reporting on Ahmadinejad sucks.

(3) The AP sucks.

Put it all together and you get a sucky article, reproduced a hundred times over by reporters too lazy and ill-informed to correct or expand it.

Thanks for the offer of Persian help. What I could really use would be a good online dictionary, preferably one that gives full vowel pointing and lists inflected forms. The only paper one we have that does this is Steingass', which I think you'll agree is just a little bit dated.

[wiped.livejournal.com]

of course i agree on statements 1-3 :)

the steingass dictionary is trustworthy, just dated as you said, and it's actually available online.

there are two other online dictionaries i use (this one and this one), though unfortunately neither of them offer harakat nor english transliteration. if you're looking for a more current paper dictionary, i recommend the aryanpour progressive persian learner's dictionary.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I located a copy of the Aryanpour, but I'm having some trouble with it. Namely, the vowel marking seems to be inconsistent. For instance, I was trying to check the syllabification of naw'javān and discovered that the fatḥa was left off the first syllable; the same was true of naw'bāvah. Now, Steingass gives naw as the first syllable of each and the derivations are pretty transparent, so what gives? Is there really a shift of naw > nū in some compounds or is Aryanpour just messing with me?

[wiped.livejournal.com]

i was puzzling over your comment and i'm still not sure what is confusing to you.

naw'javān should be written as ناجوان
naw'bāvah should be written as ناباوه

neither of which would have any vowel marking whatsoever on the first syllable, نا. also i'm unsure how you got from نا to نو. for instance, naw'javān would never be pronounced as nu'javān. however, there is a shift of /a/ to /u/ in certain words in colloquial farsi (as opposed to dari or tajiki), in which words such as /nan/ or /anja/ become /nun/ or /unja/ in informal speech. however, naw'javān is not affected by this.

i don't know if that clears anything up for you or if it's nothing new. i'm curious as to where the naw > nū thing came from.