Journal Entry 5
I feel that I’ve met my learning goals for weeks 4 and 5, with the caveat that the second goal of improving pronunciation and reading skills will take likely the rest of the semester (and the start of next semester). With having a conversation in Persian, I feel comfortable with speaking slowly and with a relatively pre-set “script” so to speak, but when straying outside of my area of knowledge, I struggle immensely to parse individual words and structures. I will need to work on improving my ability to speak and respond to spoken Persian.
Cultural Post 4
Persian is usually written in the Perso-Arabic script, an adaptation of the Arabic script that adds an additional four letters to represent sounds not found in Arabic (such as /p/ or /g/). There are several historical Persian scripts used to write Middle and Old Persian, as well as Pahlavi, Avestan, and other Iranian languages. Many of these share a common origin with Arabic, originally coming into being from the early Phoenician alphabet. In the modern day, however, Persian is only written in “non-native” scripts, either the Perso-Arabic script, which is the closest to a native script that Persian has, Cyrillic, with Tajiki, or the Latin alphabet, usually used for transliterations for western audiences. There is no universally used way of transcribing Persian into the Latin alphabet, so the same word could be written multiple different ways. Due to both historical precedent and adaptation, it seems best to work within the Perso-Arabic script; however, I intend to learn Cyrillic at some point in order to have another means of approaching the language.
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