Progress So Far?...

[Conal R Smith]

After reading numerous websites and the recommendations that they offered for first time users, I decided to head away from the technology sector. I looked on Blackboard for the resources that were posted and I figured I might as well dive right in. I chose W.H. Thackston "An Introduction to Persian" as well as John Mace's "Persian Grammar for Reference and Revision". Both books provided an immense amount of pertinent information for first time beginners for Persian. An important beginning to the analysis of Persian is that the structure of a sentence is in the form of SUBJECT-PREDICATE-VERB and that it is written from RIGHT to LEFT and in CURSIVE. From a more grammatical and analytical perspective, some basic information that is probably unknown to those unfamiliar with Persian is that the language itself lacks gender distinction. In other words, there is no distinction between masculine, feminine, or neuter. Furthermore, there are no indefinite or definite articles. Adding to that, the writing system is defined as ABJAD system which means that each symbol stands for a consonant and the reader/speaker must apply the appropriate vowel. For example in English, a sentence could be written like this : Thr s th dg. --> There is the dog. The next couple of weeks should be fun. Thus, when one becomes more accustomed and comfortable to the language, there are symbols/stresses/context in writing and speech that signify if there are many things or just a single thing (This lesson is for a future week). Another important note is that ALL nouns and adjectives are stressed on the final syllable when spoken. A week ago, I started with simple numbers and tried to get down the pronunciation and spelling. This wasn't as a difficult as I had thought before. Wait for it. Of course, Persian is written in a Perso-Arabic script that requires knowledge of the entire alphabet (just like any other language). I came into this knowing absolutely nothing of the language besides random facts but no previous educational/learning experience. In both Thackston and Mace's book, they start with the spelling and pronunciation of script. At the same time, I discovered that there are three varieties of the Arabic script in common use in Iran. First, naskh , which is the base type font and the typewrite but should not be taken as the model for handwriting. The second style, nasta'liq, is the basic cursive script and is the model for good handwriting. The third kind is a variant of the third called skekaste, where many orthographic breaks that are mandatory is naskh and nasta'liq are bridged, certain letters have wildly divergent forms, and shorthand is abound. I want to concentrate upon the second style, the nasta'liq. I also found that ALL letters have at least forms and at most four. The reason for that is since the language is written in cursive, depending upon where the character is in the word, the actual form of the character changes. Thus, there is the initial form, medial form, final word, and the alone form. Since there are 32 characters and 4 forms ( 32 times 4 ) = 128 different characters. That's a lot to remember and I'm just beginning to memorize them. Well, I think that is about what I learned this past week.