Status Updates From Basic Persian: A Grammar an...

Finished!

I feel like a new Persian.

20.2 The passive mood: how to mention the agent

This is what Persian hates most. Why use passive at all if you want to mention the agent? Passive sentences that mention the agent sound very awkward in Persian; they usually have the odor of "translations" by inexperienced translators.

- So as I was saying, it turns out that "که" is the most important word in Persian. It--

- ¿Que?

- Yes, that's right.

این means "that" as "that book", and که means "that" as in "I know that it is". So if you stick them together, you get a word which means "that that", which at first sight doesn't make sense. But in fact it's perfectly logical: think French ce que or Swedish det att.

I found their account so exciting that I managed to go past my station and had to backtrack. Kids, don't read this book on the train!

So Persian subjunctives are sort of like infinitives, and Persian infinitives are sort of like gerunds, and Persian gerunds don't exist. It all makes sense. Sort of.

"The second person singular subjunctive has the force of the imperative, but is stronger and can imply a warning."

Trying to think of parallels in languages I know, the first example that occurs to me is the common Australian particle fucken. For example, contrast (1a) with (1b):

(1a) Stay away from her!

(1b) Fucken stay away from her (fucken)!

How amazingly simple and logical Persian is! I have never seen any Indo-European language that has reached this level of analyticity and sophistication. Some words I particularly liked:

England: انگلستان ("Engelstan")
Chess: شطرنج ("shatranj")
Better: بهتر ("behtar")

More Persian grammar highlights:

- Third-person singular animate pronouns are gender-neutral. so "او" means both "he" and "she".

- When you combine a number with a noun, the noun is rather counterintuitively in the singular rather than the plural.

- There is a special word for "two hundred".

The authors of this book claim that Farsi, Dari and Tajiki should all be considered the same language, even if they have been given different names for political reasons and Tajiki is sometimes written using Cyrillic script. I'm curious to know whether native speakers of Dari and Tajiki agree...

First chapter on the Persian alphabet done. Love the rigorous systematisation and consistent pronunciation they use in the book so far. One of the exercises was about how many ways you can pronounce احمد. A total of 45 different ways! Crazy.