RE: Persian or Farsi? (was RE: Decimal separator with more than o ne c haracter?)

From: Rick Cameron (Rick.Cameron@crystaldecisions.com)
Date: Sun May 25 2003 - 02:24:47 EDT

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    I was going to drop the subject, and accept Michael's insistence that we
    choose the name Persian - I wholly agree with him that it would be great if
    we could avoid using two names for this language. Since ISO 639 has chosen
    Persian, that's good enough for me.

    But then Roozbeh had to direct a message to me that absolutely requires a
    couple of comments ;^)

    When I was looking at the President's site, I tried to find a link to
    something like the Academy, without success - thanks for providing it. One
    problem: the home page of the site is all in Persian! (See how I've
    assimilated? ;^) I visited a few other pages, and they're all in Persian,
    too. (Unfortunately, Persian is not among the small set of languages I can
    read - a sad fact I hope to rectify once my ship comes in...)

    So I took out my trusty Google & searched the site for 'Farsi' (hope you'll
    forgive the impertinence ;^) - and found on the page
    http://persianacademy.ir/NaamehF/naameh01.htm this text:

    متن اعلام نظر شوراي فرهنگستان زبان و ادب فارسي دربارۀ كاربرد Farsi به جاي
    Persian در مكاتبات وزارت امور خارجه

    It's a link, but unfortunately a broken one. Would someone care to translate
    this? Google failed me there.

    As for Roozbeh's assertion that it is politically incorrect to use the term
    'Farsi'- like Karl Pentzlin I'd love an explanation. If anything I thought
    that its use was politically correct - that the current regime in Iran might
    prefer it, because the word Persian might have associations with the regime
    of the Shah, or with colonialism.

    Thanks!

    - rick

    -----Original Message-----
    From: Roozbeh Pournader [mailto:roozbeh@sharif.edu]
    Sent: Saturday, 24 May 2003 5:28
    To: Rick Cameron
    Cc: Michael Everson; unicode@unicode.org
    Subject: RE: Persian or Farsi? (was RE: Decimal separator with more than o
    ne c haracter?)

    On Wed, 21 May 2003, Rick Cameron wrote:

    > The people who write content for the website of the President of Iran
    > - http://www.president.ir/ - apparently prefer to use the word Farsi.

    Doesn't mean anything. Those guys are not linguistically competetive
    enough. You should try the Academy instead:

            http://www.persianacademy.ir/

    > Give it up, Michael! Clearly 'Farsi' has become an acceptable
    > alternative to 'Persian'.

    Anyway, it is politically-incorrect to call it 'Farsi'.

    roozbeh



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