تعارف
tah-AH-rof
The elaborate dance of refusing what you want and offering what you cannot spare
A taxi driver may refuse your fare three times before accepting it.
Both sides know the script, and taking the first refusal literally is the mistake.
The archive
Persian
Indo-European in Arabic script
A relative of English and German, written in an Arabic script it borrowed, with no grammatical gender at all.
FamilyProto-Indo-European › Indo-Iranian › Iranian › Persian
ScriptPerso-Arabic, right to left
Speakers78M 57M native · 21M second
Weeks to a working level44 Counted from English. It is the Foreign Service Institute's figure for someone starting from English and from nothing.
The first hundred words cover41.5% and the first thousand 71.9%
- It is Indo-European. Persian mādar, pedar and barādar are mother, father and brother, and that is not a coincidence.
- No grammatical gender and no articles, which makes the grammar much lighter than its script suggests.
- The ezāfe, a small unwritten vowel, links nouns to their modifiers and holds phrases together.
- One language, three countries, three names: Farsi in Iran, Dari in Afghanistan, Tajik in Tajikistan, and Tajik is written in Cyrillic.
- It carried the poetry of Rumi, Hafez and Ferdowsi, and Persian speakers still quote them in ordinary conversation.
The language of Rumi and Hafez, so regular it feels designed: no gender, no cases, verbs that behave. The poetry is the point, and it is closer than you think. Iranian cinema wins at Cannes for a reason, and a thousand years of poetry is quoted daily in living rooms from Tehran to Dushanbe.
Words with no translation
دلبر
del-BAR
The one who carries your heart away
Literally heart-carrier.
Persian poetry runs on words like this: the beloved is not described, only the effect they have.
دل
DEL
Heart, but as the organ of perception rather than emotion.
Del is the Persian heart: the organ of courage, desire, memory and appetite all at once. Half of Persian poetry is an argument between the speaker and their own del.
هیچ
HEECH
Nothingness, held as beautiful rather than frightening.
Hich is nothing, and Persian art fell in love with it: sculptors shape the word itself, poets weigh it against everything. The nothingness that Sufism says you must become to be filled.
Next to its neighbours
Where Persian parts company with the languages closest to it, and what each one would cost you from here.
Where to practise it
Reading about a language is not speaking it. These are the places I would go to find someone to speak Persian with.
The Persian Passepartout is not out yet
Five printed pages that carry you through the arrival. Leave your address and you hear about it first, and nothing else.
Leaving takes one click.
Stories in Persian
Short stories written inside a measured vocabulary, with the word lists and nothing invented for a textbook.