Persian: Lesson 6

8th November, 2016
This is quite a short entry, I think; and it's also - in its way - an upbeat one.  There's a few take-home points from the past couple of lessons.

1. Grammar. This is beginning to worry me - less because it’s complicated than because it isn’t. Nouns and verbs have to agree, but we’ve started to pluralise things, and – so far at least – nouns don’t decline.  Nominative, genitive, ablative: all the same.  Neither is there a clear difference between the singular and the plural: one chair, two chair.

I say that there's not a clear difference - there is a difference.  You can pluralise by adding the suffix "ها"; but how that's used isn't obvious.  As things stand, it looks like it's sometimes used and sometimes not; I've not got my head around what the rule is that governs that.

Why is this worrying? Because it can’t be that simple, can it? I fear we’re about to get bitten.

2. Let’s talk about diacritics and dipthongs. There aren’t too many vowels in the Persian alphabet. Aleph (ا) does a huge amount of work – it can function as ø, æ, or ɒ:, and possibly more besides. Much depends on what accents and diacritics are used – and these don’t really have to be written. Thus ا is pronounced differently from آ, and أ, and إ, though (as far as I can make out) أ and إ are likely to be written simply as ا.

In an previous entry, I mentioned the sentence "This is Sara", pronounced something like "Een Sarā ast/ ist" - the verb "to be" can take a couple of pronunciations, because "To be" is nuts in all Indo-European languages. Anyway: here's that sentence, with the alephs highlighted:

این سارا اَست.

Potentially, we're looking at four different pronunciations from just one letter.

On top of that, there’s the semi-vowel ye, which is written as ﯾ, or ـﯿ, or ی, depending on whether it’s an initial, medial, or final letter.  (Did I mention that letters have three written forms, depending on where they appear in a word and which letters appear to their left?)   It can also modify the aleph; hence the word "Iran" is pronounced "Ee-rōn", though it contains two alephs - you spell it "ایران". (That does explain the American pronunciation: "Aye-ran" does make a kind of sense.)  Correspondingly, my name would be written as "ایان"; I'm not sure how a Persian speaker would cope with the "ya" sound in my name: my hunch is that they'd want to extend it into a longer "ō".

There’s another semivowel, vav (written as و as an initial, or ـو as a medial or final letter), which is sometimes pronounced as “u”, and sometimes as “v”. That depends on whether it’s next to a vowel or a consonant. (Come to think of it, that's fairly straightforward: the Latin v usually has a “u” or “w” sound, except when it doesn’t.  And there's something in the back of my mind telling me that Hebrew does something similar - which'd make sense, on the basis that there's a close relationship between Hebrew and Arabic, and Persian took the Arabic alphabet.)  But what I’ve not worked out yet is whether the invisible vowels count to modify it. We shall see…

Oh, and writing the letter s - س - is difficult, and "st" (ست) and "sp" (سپ) more so: it's like writing a w from right to left, which is bad enough; but once you've started, it's hard to know when to stop. I have no idea how I'll cope if I ever need to use a double s. "سس" might be an orthographic black hole, from which one never escapes.

Actually, there is the number 6.  Pronounced "shesh", it looks on the page like this:

 شش

Yipes.