Latinized Persian
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One of my favorite photographs shows Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) teaching the alphabet to citizens:
Here are some other scenes from that period of language reform in Turkey:
.jpg)
("Turkish alphabet reform", Wikipedia)
It would seem that some Persian speakers hold the same dream for their non-Arabic language as Turkish script reformers did for their non-Arabic language in the 1920s.
"Persian Latin standard — Standardizing the Persian Latin script", fias (Federative Institute for Advanced Study)
The enormous and rich civilization of the consortium Iran—Afghanistan—Tajikistan is only poorly known in the West. One of the factors that impedes wide popularization of the Persian culture, literature and language is the defective Arabic script used to represent the otherwise Indo-European language. Not only doesn’t it provide for broad dissemination in non-specialist masses, but also disimproves the specialists’ and dedicated learners’ experience in productive language use in the modern era governed by the Latin script.
While the Arabic script is omnipresent in the region and while its Persian recension is granted even constitutionally (Art. 15 of the Constitution of the IRI) the prerogative to transcribe any of the numerous languages of the country, the transcriptional universality in the international scope has also been sought by scholars. This conducted to the elaboration by the Iranian National Committee on the Standardization of Geographic names of the Transcription procedure for Iranian toponymic items that has been subsequently adopted and approved by the United Nations in 2012.
An attempt has been made to generalize the application of this standard so that one can write any Persian texts on the basis of this standard. The first step to produce a didactic package for the Persian Latin script has been made at the Iranian Society in Frankfurt, by Dr. Hamid Farroukh: Alefbā-ye 2om: a parallel script for the Persian language. It was firstly intended to educate the young (second generation) Iranians of the diaspora in the environment with no massive presence of the Persian Arabic script-based content.
The Persian Latin script movement has many projects for advancing its aims. One is the:
Persian manual
Mā fārsi balad‐im! ‘we know / speak Persian’ is an open source Persian manual by Hamid Farroukh, PhD serving at the Iranian Society in Frankfurt (Germany).
The methodological advantage of this manual is that its original layout is set up entirely in Persian. With this approach, the author continues the honourable tradition of self-explained handbooks headed of course by the “Lingua latina per se illustrata” by Hans H. Ørberg.
The project maintains that the Latin script for the Persian language is not a “romanization”. The detailed argument against this deprecated naming will be described in a future link.
Selected readings
- "Aborted character simplification in the mid-1930s" (10/5/24)
- "'No Turkish leader has had as much influence as Ataturk as Erdogan'" (12/14/14)
[h.t. IA]
cameron said,
April 22, 2025 @ 9:03 am
there used to be a project called UniPers – with a pretty straightforward proposed romanization scheme. but the official website seems to have vanished.
of course, in Tajikistan they've been using a nice Cyrillic script for quite some time
J.W. Brewer said,
April 22, 2025 @ 9:08 am
I was going to say that if they just generalize the Tajik/Cyrillic approach to the Farsiphone diaspora in Western countries no one can level accusations of "romanization." (One could have a second-order system for romanizing the Cyrillic, of course …)
J.W. Brewer said,
April 22, 2025 @ 9:23 am
As it happens, wikipedia offers a chart showing no fewer than seven different systems for romanizing Cyrilic-scripted Tajik, so everyone can pick a favorite. There's also a system for writing it in the Hebrew alphabet, as traditionally used by the Bukharan Jews. That might be a diasporic approach calculated to maximize political distance from the current regime in Tehran.
cameron said,
April 22, 2025 @ 9:39 am
using the Hebrew script wouldn't improve one of the main problems of the Arabic script: the non-representation of vowels without rarely-used diacriticals
back in the 1920s the Soviet authorities came up with Latin-based written forms for the Central Asian languages, including Tajik, but then second-guessed themselves and decided on Cyrillic.
eurobubba said,
April 22, 2025 @ 10:16 am
Gonna start looking for opportunities to use the word 'disimprove' — I suspect they'll be plentiful!
Coby said,
April 22, 2025 @ 10:26 am
@cameron: the Hebrew script can be adapted so as to represent vowels, as is the case for Yiddish. As regards Judeo-Persian (of which there are many varieties), see, for example, the chart in the Wikipedia page on Bukharian (Judeo-Tajik dialect).