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Learning Persian without Arabic? | ||
Tags: Farsi/Persian | Arabic | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| ChristopherB Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 6317 days ago 851 posts - 1074 votes  2 sounds Speaks: English*, German, French | Message 1 of 35 01 August 2010 at 7:44am | IP Logged | ||
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Moderators:
For some strange reason I can't post a new thread in the Specific Languages forum without the new post being tacked onto the end of the top thread in that sub forum. Could you please move this thread and rename it to Learning Persian without Arabic? Thank you! Although I have no intentions of touching a Middle-Eastern language until I have a solid foothold in Chinese, I came across a very interesting comment at the very end of Narguess Farzad's Modern Persian course from the Teach Yourself series. With regard to the acquisition of vocabulary and advanced study of Persian literature, the author writes:
I had always planned to go for Arabic after having "learned" Chinese, but the idea of going for Persian first has become increasingly more appealing. However the alleged impossibility of attaining a deeper mastery of this language without Arabic is unfortunately rather off-putting and also a little confusing, for these languages are, I'm told, worlds apart, certainly purely in terms of their genetic origins, but also consequently with respect to their entire grammatical structures and even their sound inventories. It's true that Persian has drawn massive lexical influences from Arabic and to this end I can sort of see why Arabic would be useful - knowing the etymological source of what could be as high as 50% of Persian vocabulary would of course be an enormous asset in retaining the meanings of words - but not only would one have to learn the cognates from scratch in either case, to say Arabic is in fact a necessity seems completely absurd to me, since I'm sure few, if any, would ever maintain that a learner, let alone a native speaker, could not understand the "subtleties of the common language" without having previously studied another, utterly different language. So, could any elaborate on or dispel this claim? Can one gain a deep literary understanding of Persian without ever having formally studied Arabic? Edited by ChristopherB on 01 August 2010 at 10:42am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6380 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 35 01 August 2010 at 7:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Ok, done. The forum software is currently experiencing some kind of bug. Edited by newyorkeric on 01 August 2010 at 7:53am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| johntm93 Senior Member United States Joined 5328 days ago 587 posts - 746 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 3 of 35 01 August 2010 at 8:29am | IP Logged | ||
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I think you could learn Persian fine without Arabic, after all, they are in different language families.
6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5321 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 4 of 35 01 August 2010 at 1:17pm | IP Logged | ||
I only dabbled with Persian a couple of years ago and found both the Persian prononciation of Arabic loanwords and the somewhat large number of false friends confusing. For example shahr (شهر) means month in Arabic but city in Persian. For more examples see the following web site. This means that even if you knew Arabic, which is not exactly an easy language to learn, you could never be 100% sure that an Arabic loanword is used with exactly the same meaning in Persian. Therefore I don't think that it's necessary to learn Arabic first. Besides, if you decide to study Persian and are curious about the etymology of Arabic loanwords you could simply consult a non root based Arabic/English dictionary. 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Remy Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5546 days ago 10 posts - 13 votes | Message 5 of 35 01 August 2010 at 1:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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If you're serious about Persian then you'll have to at some point learn at least the basics of Arabic word formation,
since a ridiculous amount of vocabulary is derived from Arabic. I don't really care all that much for written Persian literature (I'm mostly interested in folklore and oral literature), but I'm sure you'd be able to manage fine just with having learnt about Arabic word derivation from triconsonantal roots. Edited by Remy on 01 August 2010 at 1:18pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7145 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 6 of 35 01 August 2010 at 3:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'll agree that you can go quite far in Persian without knowing Arabic per se, at least if you're not dealing with texts, such as on religion, that might be peppered with quotes from the Qur'an, etc.
My favorite entry point into Persian, which makes the way very smooth indeed, is the OLD "Teach Yourself Modern Persian", by John Mace, which has a much easier learning curve than the newer version by Narguess Farzad. Mace includes the following in the introduction to his book: "Arabic forms of speech and orthography do appear in everyday Persian talking and writing, and where they do we have mentioned them; but there is no more need for the student of modern Persian to learn Arabic than there is for the person learning, say, French, to know Latin first. I do not speak, understand, read, or write Arabic beyond the half-dozen or so examples of it which appear in this book." (Mace evidently learned Arabic later, as he's written several Arabic books, but I think his comment above is pretty accurate.) Copies of the Mace book, out of print since replaced by the Farzad one, can still be found fairly easily via used book sources, and a certain site in Uzbekistan should also be checked... 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| aldous Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5243 days ago 73 posts - 174 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 7 of 35 01 August 2010 at 5:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's true that Persian and Arabic belong to different language families and are therefore genetically unrelated. It's also true that their grammar and phonology are very different. But the Arabic influence on Persian goes beyond the massive lexical borrowing.
My short answer to your question is that there are bits of Arabic grammatical code embedded in Persian. Offhand I would say the most common Arabic grammatical features I come across are Arabic's broken and sound plurals, the formation of the adverb, and the idafa construction (a.k.a. the construct state). Moreover, knowing some basic patterns of Arabic morphology will help you guess the meaning of a word without having seen it before. On the other hand, there are many features of Arabic grammar that I've never had to use in Persian, like the gender agreement of numbers or the declension of nouns when governed by 'anna and her sisters (yes, that's a real thing in Arabic grammar). So I think what Farzad is getting at is not that you have to have a comprehensive knowledge of Arabic, but rather you have know about those features that come up a lot. Memorizing stock phrases is okay for a while, but you have to know the logic behind their formation to be really competent with the language. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Here's a passage from the Jawāhir al-akhbār, a work of history written in Iran in the Persian language in the late 16th century. (The title, by the way, is an Arabic phrase in the idafa construction, meaning "the gems of the [historical] reports".) The passage refers to the coming to power of the Ottoman sultan Selim the Grim in 1512. (I represent long vowels with macrons in unicode. I hope it renders correctly). nāqilān-i akhbār chonīn naql kardeand ke dar mamlakat-i rūm pādishāh-i dhī-jāhī nabūd, chūn nawbat-i sultanat be sultān salīm rasīd akthar bilād-rā gereft va mustaqillan be takht neshest Here is what the text would look like if you only knew Arabic: "CarrierXX of news XXXX transport XXXXXXX XX XX Kingdom of Rome XXXXXX possessor of rank XXXX, XXX the change/misfortune* of the sultanate to Sultan Selim XXXX more countries XX XXXX and independently to XXX XXXX." (* Short vowels aren't written in Arabic unless absolutely necessary, so sometimes you can only tell from context which of two possibilities a word is supposed to be. In this case, without the Persian words and the larger historical context, you can't know which meaning is meant here between nawba=change and nūba=misfortune.) Here is a full translation. (I'm still not great at reading and I did this translation rather quickly, so there may be some mistakes, especially with syntax.) "Carriers of news then conveyed that in the Kingdom of Rome (i.e. the Ottoman empire) the high-ranking (or highly esteemed) emperor was no more. When the turn of the sultanate came to Sultan Selim he seized many countries and sat in the throne independently..." Now I'll make a few comments on the text to illustrate what I said above. naql: Naql is an Arabic word meaning 'moving, carrying, transport'. If this were Arabic, the word naql would be conjugated (in this case: naqalū), but in Persian they use a sort of helping verb instead: 'naql kardan', meaning 'to make naql'. They do this with hundreds of Arabic verbs. Naql kardan is a fairly common verb. This text also has the less common word nāqil. If you know that in Arabic active participles are often formed cācic (where the c's stand for consonants), then you will immediately recognize that nāqil means 'one who carries'. If you don't know that little element of Arabic morphology, then you'd have to memorize the word nāqil separately. mustaqillan: This is Arabic for 'independently'. The -an ending is spelled according to the Arabic morphology (a double fatha and an alif) which makes no sense in Persian. But Persians spell it the Arabic way anyway. This is an example of what in Persian look like orthographic oddities but are in fact normal spellings in Arabic that have been transferred without alteration. Another example is بالاخر, pronounced bil akhar, an Arabic phrase meaning 'at the end' which Persian borrowed without changing the spelling. But if you pronounce it in Persian phonetically it reads bālā khar, meaning 'above the donkey'. Plurals: The Persian way of forming the plural is regular: -hā for inanimate objects and -ān for animate beings. But Arabic plurals are frequently encountered. In this text, the author used the Persian plural for nāqil (nāqilān) instead of an Arabic form (nāqilūn or nuqqāl). But he uses the Arabic broken plural for akhbār (sing. khabar=report) and bilād (sing. balad=country). There's more I could parse, but this post is already long. I studied Arabic first before taking up Persian, and that really helped my progress in Persian. All the things that look irregular in Persian don't look irregular to me, they just look like Arabic. So my advice to anyone interested in both languages is to start with Arabic. Now, if you are only interested in Persian, you don't have to study Arabic per se, but I would think learning the irregular features of the language will be made easier by knowing some Arabic grammar – learning it on a case-by-case basis. 35 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| minus273 Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5766 days ago 288 posts - 346 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Ancient Greek, Tibetan | Message 8 of 35 01 August 2010 at 5:36pm | IP Logged | ||
Great exposition! Kudos! 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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