Journal Entry 3
My learning goals this week were to learn the ezafe construction and “to be” in the present tense. Both of these were somewhat odd to learn for me personally since the ezafe, which is a genitive construction, is an Arabic word for a very similar way of linking words together, but they are linguistically completely unrelated. The Persian for “to be” (būdan) is declined in the present tense very similarly to Latin (est in Latin, āst in Persian for the third person, singular, present). I largely learned these from my textbook, with supplemental resources from Jahanshiri and other online resources.
Cultural Post 3
Persian has an extensive culture around what is known as taarof, which is a system of etiquette involving a lot of humility and excessiveness politeness. If you ask how much something is worth in a shop, the shopkeeper might say, “it’s worth nothing” multiple times. Similarly, the polite thing to do is to offer and refuse food multiple times during meals or offer favors. This is something that will take a long time to fully learn.
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