My friend Rémy LeBeau has posted a nice list of vocabulary items specific to Persian of Afghanistan along with transcription and Iranian Persian equivalents (so if you don’t read Iranian Persian already, they won’t be of much use). They are taken from contemporary literature, but that doesn’t mean they’re all formal – in fact, they [...]
فارسی جنگلیست که منظمی باغ و بوستان را ندارد ولی پر از زیبائیهاست. از جنوب به آن عطر عربستان میاید و بوی فرنگستان از غرب. ولی بوی جوی مولیان پررنگتز از آن دو تاست و به هر جای جنگل آید همی. اینجای بنهای هزارساله پیداست که پهلویش گیاهی تازه میرویاد و ریشهی هر دو از [...]
… to oczywiście nic takiego się nie stanie, ale nie ukrywam, że trochę mnie to drażni. Troszeczkę. Po pierwsze, “perski” to bardzo ładne słowo, dobrze zadomowione w polszczyźnie. Mamy i perskie dywany i perskie oko, więc czemuż nie i język perski. Oczywiście można powiedzieć, że kraj współcześnie nazywa się Iran, a nie Persja, więc dla [...]
Recently I came across a cute Persian colloquial expression I had never heard before: رفتن با اتوبوس خط١١ [raftan bā otubus-e xatt-e yāzdah] ‘going somewhere on the bus no. 11′ This, a cookie to everyone who guessed, means ‘to go by foot’ as the number ١١ looks quite similar to a pair of legs. Somehow [...]
I learnt a new Persian word yesterday a couple days before: آفتاب گرفتگی [aftab gereftegi] which means ‘solar eclipse’ and immediately a following chain of thoughts and associations was launched: It’s quite funny how the words for “eclipse” in Persian, English and Polish differ in what do they originally/etymologically mean. آفتاب گرفتگی would translate literally [...]
Just occurred to me you might want to know about a major blow to my (over)confidence that happened at a movie festival in Tehran. What happened was that I could follow Persian-language movies alright (more or less), but when watching English-language ones, I learnt that the Persian subtitles change way too fast for me to [...]
