From: Tex Texin (tex@i18nguy.com)
Date: Sun May 18 2003 - 19:53:58 EDT
Hi Roozbeh,
I was responsible for message files for a product at another company and there
was one language file we called Persian.
We received a (small) number of negative comments that we needed to change to
Farsi. The most memorable one, was the one that informed us we were idiots for
providing "a file for a language that hasn't been used for 5,000 years". The
acerbic message was funny enough, but it struck me even funnier that renaming
it Farsi, somehow magically upgraded the file by 5,000 years and made him
happy.
I don't recall who complained, I am pretty sure they were not in Iran at the
time. But when we called it Farsi, we didn't get further complaints.
At the time when I looked around at what other companies were doing, I found
support for calling it Farsi.
Also, I suspect it makes no sense to consider immigrants experts on the
language name in other languages.
If we did so, then we would have to change Japanese to Nihongo and German to
Deutsche.
It seems native speakers don't get to vote.
;-)
tex
Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
>
> 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
-- ------------------------------------------------------------- Tex Texin cell: +1 781 789 1898 mailto:Tex@XenCraft.com Xen Master http://www.i18nGuy.com XenCraft http://www.XenCraft.com Making e-Business Work Around the World -------------------------------------------------------------
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