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).

* From the point of view of blogging all this, it's worth noting that the default typeface for the Arabic alphabet is tiny, and I can't seem to increase its size without buggering up the formatting of the whole paragraph. There's also the problem that the computer knows which alphabet is being used, and so what the direction is in which things should be read, which makes deleting things tricky if you want to add or remove spaces - and it's next to impossible to cut and paste things when the direction in which you're blocking text changes mid-way through a line. It turns out that the right arrow key tells the computer to block things not so much from left to right, but from the beginning to the end of the word; and if you've switched between keyboards but then deleted what you wrote, you might still have a space or something from the other alphabet, which'll bugger up blocking text for the whole line. That's how I'm going to explain away any typos.

** By convention, the "x" is pronounced as kh.