Persian: Lessons 2-3

Once again failing to realise my intention of writing these things up in real time, I've got to admit that there's actually nothing to report for either of these lessons, because it'd never occurred to me to record what was happening at the time.

I had a meeting in London on the 4th October, so missed lesson two.  That wasn't ideal at all - but, on the other hand, the British Medical Association provides quite good biscuits during meetings, so it's swings and roundabouts.

Looking back at the handouts from that week, there were a few reading exercises, to translate simple sentences along the lines of

این سارا اَست. سارا َزن اَست
This is Sara; Sara is a woman

and

آن آماندا اَست، سارا نیست

That is Amanda, not Sara.

Quite obviously, things were centred around "This is x; x is y" or "x is not z". These exercises would have been based on what we did in class in week 1. I can't remember if these were things we were expected to have translated in time for lesson 2, or in time for lesson 3. To be honest, I can't imagine that it would have made a heck of a lot of sense to expect us to do that after only one lesson.

Still, there're some important points. First, word-order is straightforwardly subject-object-verb. Negations are also straightforward: you just bung an "n" prefix on to the verb. Hence

اَست

ist

becomes

نیست
nist.

If the verb begins with a consonant, the prefix is "na"; whether that's adding a phoneme to the negation in some cases, or swallowing it in others, is neither here nor there.

Another thing to notice is the omnipresence of the aleph: ا.*  The role and pronunciation of the aleph is slightly complicated, we're warned; but we can tell already that it's sometimes pronounced as "Ah", as in the first syllable of "Sara", sometimes as "A", as in "Amanda", and sometimes as "ee" when we're saying "ist".  Sometimes there're diacritics to indicate pronunciation.  Sometimes there aren't. Oh, and the negative prefix, for some reason, turns the ا into an ی, except that the ی appears as ﯾ when it's neither the final letter of a word nor connected to any preceding letters, and ـﯿ when it's in the middle of a word and is connected to preceding letters.  Pay attention.

There's also the first chunk of vocabulary to learn. Fortunately, there's a Latin transliteration alongside the Persian; but it's a fairly strange collection of words. Some are explicable enough at this stage in proceedings: pen (خودکار; xodkār**), chair (صندلی; sandali), table (میز; miz), school (مدرسه; madresē), university (دانِشگاه; daneshgah), student (دانشجو; daneshju) and so on. Others are less expected so early in the course: driver (را َننده; ranandeh); lucky/ prosperous (خوشبخت; xoshbaht), ugly (زشت; zest). Some would say that the selection of vocabulary is scattergun. Still, I do like how "home" and "family" are, respectively, خانه (xanē) and خانواده (xanevadeh).

Persian: Lesson 1

Having said that I was going to repost and elaborate on the Tuesday Persian Updates I've been posting on Facebook without hindsighted commentary, I find myself having to break my own rule already.

Why?  Simply because it never occurred to me in the first few weeks to record what was happening, so there's going to have to be quite a lot of invention.  Here's the first mention of it, from the 22nd September:

I've decided to sign up for a language course. But which?
(a) Russian - I've not done it since GCSE, and was never much good at it even then. (The A grade came more from knowing how to game the exam rubric than for understanding the language.) Requires the linguistic equivalent of intensive care.
(b) French - Did it to old-style A/S level; I was reasonably good, but am rusty now. Linguistic physiotherapy.
(c) Persian - Never spoken a word, but love the country, and have wanted to learn it for years. Linguistic IVF.
Help me decide, o internet!

The internet leaned towards Persian, with the odd suggestion of things like Tocharian, because that actually counts as trolling among some of my friends.  My heart was also leaning towards Persian anyway, though, so that was reassuring.  Indeed, I'd found someone in January who was working as a private tutor in Persian, and had fully intended to chase that up except that real life had got in the way and made it impractical.

Merely learning to read the alphabet counted for a lot in my decision: that was one of the reasons I did Russian at school.  We used to have French lessons in B4, which was the room in which Russian was taught.  I'd see the Cyrillic script on the blackboard, and want to be able to read it.  A few years later, being able to make out the shapes of the letters was the most satisfying part of my abortive attempt to teach myself Greek.  The Arabic alphabet is a bigger hill to climb, but I like being able to read stuff.

Here's what I wrote on the 27th September, just before lesson 1:

In which I Learn Persian

Back at the start of the academic year, I signed up for a course of beginners' Persian.  I've been a bit of a Persephile for as long as I can remember, and meaning to take lessons in the language for ages.  Then I learned that the University offers language classes to the public, and that Persian is on the menu.

So I signed up.

It was either that, or blowing the cobwebs of French, or grinding the rust off Russian, or starting German from scratch.  All had their advantages.  But I chose Persian.

Lessons are for three hours on a Tuesday evening; I've been providing a potted précis on Facebook week-by-week since.  But it might be interesting to repost those updates here, with a little elaboration as I deem fit.  I'm going to try to ensure that they appear in "real time" - to the greatest extent possible, the posts will not alter according to what I would come to know or think later.  Having said that, it might be impossible to add to what I was thinking at the time without that kind of distortion.  We shall see.

So, over the next few days, that's what I'll do.  Spoiler alert: I'm not very good at it.

In the meantime, here's a couple of photos from my trip to Iran in 2004.  (Some people go on package tours to the Algarve.  I went to a totalitarian theocracy - albeit one where the totalitarian theocracy seemed only to be skin-deep.)

This was taken in Yazd, where I ended up with sunstroke.  Annoyingly, I can't remember the names of most of the other people who were in the group.  I think the guy with the moustache that you can half-see was Paul.  But I do remember the name of the guy in the foregroud.  He was a German teacher from Aberdeen called Kenny.  Kenny had a very low tolerance for bullshit - in Esfahan, for example, he noticed that there was someone who was following us around during a bit of free time when he, I, and one or two others went for a wander around the city.  He was suspicious that our shadow might have been a policeman of some sort, so went to engage him in conversation.

In the course of that conversation, our shadow claimed that he'd worked in Germany for 20 years.  Naturally, Kenny responded by talking in German.  The shadow had no clue what he was on about.
"But I thought you lived in Germany for two decades?"
"Yes, but we never left our compound."
"For twenty years?"
"..."

Iranian police informers need to be a bit less obvious, I think.

Kenny also had a habit of joking that he was the Hidden Imam.  While the jokes were in English, they were also in public.  I'm not sure of the wisdom of that.

Anyway.

Here's another photo, this time taken under the Khaju bridge in Esfahan.  There's no story that attaches to it in any way; I don't know who the man is.  However, I do like the photo for a couple of reasons.  First, it's one of the rare pictures that I've managed to centre more or less correctly, so the perspective is good.  Second - I can take no credit for this at all - I like the way that the guy's outline follows the lines of perspective: his right arm following the vertical axis, and the line from his head to his left shoulder following the diagonal from the centre to the bottom right.  There's another reason on top of those that I like it, which is that there's a very similar photo that's on the cover of a fairly popular book - though I can't remember for the life of me what it is.  Anyway: that version of the photo on the book doesn't have anyone in it.  I think my picture is better.

So there we are.  The drip-feed record of my adventures in the language will begin anon; in a couple of weeks, we'll be up to the present.  Maybe one or two people will be interested.

"Denial" and Disinterest

Having taken myself off to see Denial the other night, I've been thinking about its portrayal of law - specifically, how it's done in the English courtroom.

The film that tells the story of Holocaust-denying Nazi third-rate historian David Irving's libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt.  His complaint was, basically, that she shouldn't have called him a Holocaust-denying Nazi third-rate historian, and that in doing so she was a big meanie, and booooo!  And, of course, as everyone knows, he lost.  This is why I can call him a Holocaust-denying Nazi third-rate historian here with impunity.  (Well, under the terms of the 2013 Defamation Act, I probably could anyway: the requirement for serious harm would mean that a blog with a readership as low as this would slip through the net.  But the point stands.  English law was satisfied that David Irving is a Holocaust-denying Nazi third-rate historian.)

One of the plot points - can one talk about a plot when one is aiming to represent reality?  I suppose you can: you can't distill a dispute that lasted years into a couple of hours without (a) deciding that there's a story worth telling there, (b) where the main parts of that story are to be found, and (c) weaving them into a plot - Anyway: one of the plot points concerns the way that English libel laws worked at the time.  These laws famously made it very hard to defend a libel action; the burden of proof would be on Lipstadt to show that she was correct, rather than on Irving to show her incorrect.  In a reversal of the normal order of legal proceedings, she'd have to prove her innocence; in effect, she'd have to show that the Holocaust happened.  Rachel Weisz' Lipstadt is clearly flummoxed by all this; and the film is plainly sympathetic to her confusion.  The English defamation laws were a mess.  (Whether they still are is for another post.)  Lipstadt is also baffled by the distinction between solicitors and barristers, meaning that it's a surprise to her that the lawyer she'd hired to take her case, and who'd be doing the donkey-work to put it together, would not be the lawyer who presented it in court.

I mean, you can see why someone not brought up on the system would think it weird.