From: Roozbeh Pournader (roozbeh@sharif.edu)
Date: Sun May 18 2003 - 11:49:08 EDT
On Sun, 18 May 2003, John Cowan wrote:
> > Well, the question is: who told you to call it Farsi?!
>
> Nobody, officially. But the term has come into use in U.S. English at least,
> for whatever reasons, since the Revolution.
I'm very interested if there was any time that a linguistic authority
(like Oxford) or a government was recommending Farsi instead of Persian,
and why. I would appreciate any clue.
> > ISO calls it Persian, Iranian Academy for Persian Language calls it
> > Persian, Unicode book calls it Persian, ...
>
> Persianists in this country seem to be quite firm for "Persian", but
> Iranian immigrants tend to say "Farsi". Whether this is political
> or not is not so clear.
It is ignorance from the "Farsi"-ists, in my opinion. My personal
experience tells that many of them didn't have a good command of English,
or haven't even heard the word "Persian" before they moved from Iran (Same
happens with "Dari" and Afghanistan, sometimes). They have called it Farsi
in their own language from their younger days, so why should they call it
something else when they encounter a form with an empty place for "Native
Language"?
roozbeh
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun May 18 2003 - 12:21:09 EDT