 Iran vs US - Comparison of Culture  Iran (Persian - Farsi) It represents the largest demographic weight of its speakers. It is written in the Arabic script and is considered the official state language, unifying all ethnic groups within the country. Afghanistan (Dari) Persian is known here as "Dari" (or Afghan Persian), and it is an official language alongside "Pashto." More than half of the country's population speaks it, and it serves as the common language of communication among various ethnic components. Tajikistan (Tajiki) It is the northern extension of the Persian language in Central Asia (blue colored in the map). Due to the Soviet era, the Tajik language is written today using the Cyrillic alphabet (Russian) instead of the Arabic script, but when spoken, it remains a fully comprehensible Persian language to Iranians and Afghans. And what about green-colored Uzbekistan? Its official language is Uzbek (a Turkish language). However, the citizens of great cities like Samarkand and Bukhara, located today within Uzbekistan, speak Persian (the Tajik dialect) as their first language. Therefore, the green color here represents the living cultural and demographic extension of the language, not the administrative constitutional status. Persian is not a Semitic language (like Arabic or Hebrew); it rather bears some similarity with the Indo-European family (like English and Spanish). Despite the different family, Persian (in Iran and Afghanistan) borrowed the Arabic script and a big proportion of Arabic vocabulary after the Islamic conquest, making it somehow familiar to the Arab ear. However, the formation of typical Persian words seems to be totally different from the Arabic root scheme. As there are only a few additional Persian letters adding to Arabic scripture, both scriptures are looking similar, and Arabic loan-words are therefore easy to recognize. An overall mutual understanding between both languages, however, is generally not so easy. What Arab understands Persian and what Persian understands Arabic usually depends on whom you ask ... Just try to read the famous Persian poems of Hafiz from Shiraz with a basic knowledge of the Arabic language. Only in a few cases you might succeed. Here are some English words that would have been translated into comparable expressions: English: Coran, mosque, a believer, the light, jewels, republic, news, a judge. Persian: قرآن، مسجد، مؤمن، نور، جواهرات، جمهوری، اخبار، قاضی Arabic: قرآن، مسجد، مؤمن، النور، جواهر، جمهورية، أخبار، قاضٍ By the way, only one day after my latest entry here, I happened to watch a TV documentary about the Islamic Revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini. In an interview, Khomeini was heard speaking a sentence that caught my attention, because it contained an Arabic word I recognized at once. That was استقلال which has the meaning of "independence". Together with الحرية, meaning "freedom", it belonged to the vocabulary Khomeini frequently used at the beginning of his revolution and which triggered much support from an Iranian and international community. - W. Wiesner - Enjoy 2.000 Years old Iranian Culture while walking on a Carpet Fair (Tehran 2022). Compare it with a US Bully Culture talking about taking Cuba on its way back from Iran, or of "blowing up" Oman in case they don't behave. |
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