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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| lexington1 Newbie United States Joined 5827 days ago 14 posts - 14 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Persian | Message 25 of 29 09 June 2009 at 6:11am | IP Logged | ||
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I've read a few translations of Khayyam, and maybe one or two Hafez poems. I also read a novel called Samarkand that was a fictional account of Khayyam's life, and Hassan Sabbah's as well, and of the 1905 constitutional revolution...interesting book, and it got me reading Iranian history, and there you have it.
Just curious, what university did you take Persian at? I'm at USC (South Carolina), which only offers Arabic (which I'm taking now and do geniunely want to learn...does the "two languages at once" thing ever work? Do you know of a grad school that has a good Persian program?) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| pohaku Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5653 days ago 192 posts - 367 votes  Speaks: English*, Persian Studies: Arabic (classical), French, German, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 26 of 29 09 June 2009 at 6:37am | IP Logged | ||
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I studied at U. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I couldn't really say anything about graduate Persian programs then or now. I only studied my Persian as an elective; my friend started a grad program at Berkeley in Persian. Both of us, however, are firm believers in self-study for languages (not so much for brain surgery). We've learned far more in the last four years on our own than we ever did in school. If you want to read Persian, though, and you persist for, say, a year or two, then you'll be able to comprehend--probably with some help--the simpler rubai (quatrains) such as those of Khayyam or Rumi or some simpler bayt (couplets) of Hafez. Just sequester yourself in your khalvat (private chamber) with some mei (wine) and nan (bread)and listen to the bulbul (nightingale) and breathe in the moshk (musk! a cognate!) of your beloved wafted on the bad (breeze).
The famous Fitzgerald Khayyam Rubaiyat is, of course, a justly admired work of English poetry in its own right. Dick Davis, a noted poet and translator of Persian, wrote a great essay entitled "On Not Translating Hafez," as I recall. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be available on the web anymore. His points, however, and there were many to support his thesis, spoke to the extreme problems in getting Hafez (and much the same would apply to Khayyam) across in English. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| aqeeliz Tetraglot Newbie Pakistan aqeeliz.com Joined 5748 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes Speaks: Punjabi, Urdu*, English, Hindi Studies: Spanish | Message 27 of 29 10 June 2009 at 8:24pm | IP Logged | ||
As people have mentioned before, Hindi and Urdu share huge vocabulary. So, if you learn hindi you can usually converse with Urdu speakers without much difficulty. I know few Hindi speakers (who haven't formally learned Urdu), we never had any problem conversing with each other. I haven't seen complete list of Persian alphabets so I am not sure if it covers all alphabets or not, but I as a native Urdu speaker, can read (and write) Persian, though I don't understand it, except for very few words here and there. Even if Persian doesn't cover all alphabets, I assume you would just need to familiarize yourself with few extra characters. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lexington1 Newbie United States Joined 5827 days ago 14 posts - 14 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Persian | Message 28 of 29 11 June 2009 at 2:43am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for your reply ageeliz. I've gotten mixed answers on this issue-some people say Hindi and Urdu are perfectly intelligible, while others (particularly the Hindi-speaking Indians I know in my college and some people on this forum) say that Urdu is very hard to understand for Hindi speakers-is it some kind of dialect thing, or a difference between formal Urdu vs. informal Urdu (I think someone here who'd learned Hindi mentioned having trouble with Urdu news programs)?
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| aqeeliz Tetraglot Newbie Pakistan aqeeliz.com Joined 5748 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes Speaks: Punjabi, Urdu*, English, Hindi Studies: Spanish | Message 29 of 29 18 June 2009 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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lexington1, If you know one language, you can chat with the speaker of other without much
difficulty, but formal and technical vocabulary in Urdu and Hindi are very different. Even if you know one language, you can't completely understand news / scientific programs presented in other language. But then again, Urdu is my native language (and I've read a lot of Urdu books) but I studied science subjects in English and I can't understand those technical Urdu terms, so, it's just a matter of having advanced vocabulary. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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