[XeTeX] Persian verus Farsi

[Kamal Abdali]

Thanks, Vafa, for the link to Suren-Pahlav's very informative and
interesting article.

I was struck by the quote in it from Frances Pritchett that the use of the
word "Farsi" was further promoted by Urdu-speakers. I wonder whether she is
referring to her conversations with her Urdu-speaking colleagues in Urdu or
in English. I, an Urdu speaker by birth, learned in childhood that the same
language is called "Persian" in English and "Farsi" in Urdu (sometimes
"Parsi", specially in poetry.) For example, that's how the Persian language
class was listed differently in school schedules depending on whether the
schedule was posted in Urdu or English. Different English and Urdu names
also applied to many other languages, countries, and people. Urdu books
often refer to English, French, Spanish, and Dutch languages, respectively,
as "Angrezi", "Faransesi", "Hispanvi", and "Volandezi".

This is consistent with different names used in different languages to refer
to the same language. What is called "Deutsch" in its own language is called
"German" in English, "Allemagne" in French, "Tedesco" in Italian, etc.

The word "Farsi" seems to have been used in Arabic for a long time to refer
to Persian, even by writers of Persian origin. For example, in the
Introduction of the Arabic version of the famous book on complete
quadrilaterals by the great 13th century Persian scientist Tusi, I see the
statement that the author originally wrote the book in "Farsi" but then
translated it into "Arabi" on the request of some of his scholarly friends.

There doesn't seem much to worry about Persian (or any other language) being
called differently in different languages. The cause for alarm is if a
particular language is suddenly and deliberately renamed by some group. In
English the subject language has been called "Persian" for centuries. So it
should be of concern that the Foreign Language School administered by the US
State Department calls it "Farsi"!

Kamal Abdali
=============

On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 08:48, Vafa Khalighi <vafa018 at gmail.com> wrote:

> A while ago, I insisted on using the word "Persian" instead "Farsi". My
> friend, Shapour * *Suren-Pahlav from the circle of ancient Iranian studies
> has written an article about this. You can see his article here:
> http://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Languages/persian_not_farsi.htm*
> *
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.:
>  http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://tug.org/pipermail/xetex/attachments/20110610/da53aaba/attachment.html>