Does anyone else study Persian? I’m trying to teach myself not having had enough time to stay in a course, and I’m not sure what are the best books and resources out there. I’m using Thackston’s “Introduction to Persian,” and it’s a very straightforward grammar like Wheelock’s. Are there any good audio courses or more ‘varied’ supplements?
On a related note, does Persian relate to Greek or Latin in any interesting ways? I know they’re both Indo-European, and the grammar doesn’t seem terribly difficult. I’m planning to study Greek, Persian, and Spanish at the same time, so we’ll so how that goes…
Modern Persian is descended from the language of the Parsee scriptures, Avestani, which is supposed to be extremely close to early Sanskrit. So I suppose that makes Persian a sort of niece (or younger cousin) of Greek.
I haven’t studied Persian directly (I know some Persian words through Urdu/Hindi and Arabic–I suppose I have Iran surrounded more or less like my government), but the similarities to Sanskrit are striking. One feature that I remember noticing is the correspondence between Greek gamma/kappa and a Z-sound in Persian (as in words for ‘woman’ and ‘to know’; compare with a J-sound in Sanskrit and a ZH in Slavic). This “palatalization” of Indo-European velar consonants went so far that one of the interrogatives (originally “labiovelar” like Latin ‘quo’) wound up as CHAND (‘when?’) in Persian (compare ‘kadaa’ in Sanskrit, ‘kabhi’ in Hindi, ‘kogda’ in Russian, all with K). Persian also seems to share one trait with Greek, in changing the S in words like ‘six’ and ‘seven’ to an H sound. In general, the question words, numbers, terms for family members, and some basic verbs (AST = ‘is’) will be familiar to you and will be a good base to build on.
The articles on Persian and Indo-Iranian in Britannica and in Bernard Comrie’s World’s Major Languages are informative (Comrie on the technical side, but the Indo-European chapter is well worth reading). There’s also a little old-fashioned book published by Dover that gives a brief summary grammar of Persian, with enough examples to make it interesting: E. H. Palmer, A Simplified Grammar of Arabic, Persian, and Hindustani.
Have fun! And please share your discoveries about Greek and Persian as you go along.
There’s lots of Persian pop music to be had on internet radio stations — these days most of that music is coming out of Iranian diaspora communities (Houston, LA, and Oslo if Arash is any indicator).
Now this is Farsi; I had assumed that thesaurus’ original question had to do with the cultural language that used to be used throughout the Middle East and into Mughal India that is usually just called “Persian.” Middle Persian, I guess. I don’t know how much of a difference there is, though.
The Internet Archive has the complete works of Sir William Jones, one of the volumes of which is pretty much taken up with his Persian Grammar. Supposedly he mastered Persian to such an extent that his style was admired by the Persian poets of India, so his treatment should be pretty good.
Unfortunately, they seem to be offline again today.
They are the same thing, like Shakespeare and I both speak English, except modern speakers of Persian are more likely to quote their older poets than modern English speakers are.
I’m not a huge fan of that song. “Boro Boro” got me hooked on Arash, and the video for it — Persian language singing to a Euro-dance beat with Bollywood visuals and LA hip-hop setting and props — is the side of globalization I love most.
Another suggestion I thought of, since you mentioned audio. Your public library probably has copies of the “Language 30: Farsi” audio course on CD or cassette. It’s basically a low-budget, recorded tourist phrasebook, cut from the same cookie-cutter (“how do you like your steak?”), with the text supplied along with the recording, so it might be good to get the ones for all the languages you’re interested it, like Spanish and (Modern) Greek (which will help you with Ancient Greek more than it will hurt you, trust me), and collect and compare numerals, question words, and other words and phrases of interest. I’ve listened to it, myself (with the goal of finding out to pronounce the numbers and various other words I recognized from Arabic and other languages), and found the audio very clear, enough to get you started on the right track. I recall there are issues about written vs. spoken Persian (such as whether words like AST ‘is’ are fully pronounced) and I don’t remember which way Language 30 leaned.
(I’ve also got another “real”, paper Farsi phrasebook from, I think, Lonely Planet, and liked the grammar summary and the style.)
(One correction of an earlier statement: Modern Persian is not directly descended from Zend-Avestani, but from a closely related Old Persian dialect.)
I just picked up a copy of Language 30 from the local library, so thank you for the suggestion! I think that will have to form my audio while “Introduction to Persian” forms the grammar back bone. I’m mostly interested in reading proficiency.