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).
Lucas Christopoulos said,
April 22, 2025 @ 5:51 pm
They also used Cappadocian Greek there in Kayseri between the 3rd century BC to 1923.
Lucas Christopoulos said,
April 22, 2025 @ 6:51 pm
Here more clear about Cappadocian languages:
Many former Cappadocians had shifted to a Turkish dialect (written in Greek alphabet, Karamanlica), and where the Greek language was maintained (Sille, villages near Kayseri, Pharasa town and other nearby villages), it became heavily influenced by the surrounding Turkish. This dialect of Greek is known as Cappadocian Greek. Following the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the language is now only spoken by a handful of the former population's descendants in modern Greece.
Anh Y said,
April 23, 2025 @ 9:49 am
This was an interesting read! Indeed, besides some brief discussion of the Turkish language reform during my college days, I did not know much about the history of the romanization of Persian language (and the Persosphere – perhaps really due to what you mentioned, the mismatch representation between the script and the language).
I always find the romanization history of non-Latin based language interesting, perhaps it stems from Vietnam being a Sinosphere country first attempting to develop its own (Chinese character based) logographic writing system then eventually switching to a complete Latin alphabet. Today I was in Hongkong. Although I have always known Hongkong uses jyutping to romanize, it still amazes me when I see the complete different romanization systems of Pinyin and Jyutping side by side in the metro station today (and the Jyutping seems more phonetically-simple for me to pick up).
Thank you again for sharing! Always glad to learn more!
Martin Schwartz said,
April 23, 2025 @ 9:14 pm
I don't think that using Latin script for Persian would bring about
"mass dissemination" among nonspeicalist,– or that the Arabo-Perisan script "disimproves" specialist study, from my experience
with the language; not such a big deal. Turkish in Ottoman script was much more difficult. The script is very much bound to Iranian culture by the traditional love for calligraphy. I don't foresee
in near future an event from above, like Atatürk's script reform
by firman and fiat.
But my take-away from Hamid Farroukh (why not Farrokh?)'s
mā Fārsi balad-im was puzzle at the etymology of balad
'acquainted with,knowing'. I find the word, now much used,
in Steingass' 1883 Dictioanry. Wiktionary cites, with question,
Rastugueva-Edel'man's connection with Old Indic bála-
'strength', which would perhaps squeak by semantically, but
not account for the morphology of the Persian, adj. with
unclear -ad. Then again no similar word occurs in
Middle Persian or other Middle Iranian languages or
Old Iranian, to there is a Greco-Sarmatian onomastic element
-balos of uncertain meaning.
Arabic balad = 'country, region'; it has an apparent denominative
verb ballada 'was acclimated', which would give a Pers. adj.
balad.
Turkish bil- 'to know' (which many Iranians know in
bilmiram from the Azeri equivalent of Istanbul Turkish bilmiyörüm
'I don't know)', but the voclalism of bal- and the inscrutable -ad
of Persian balad go against a connction..
If a reader expert in Persian etymology has an idea,
please do share it; I give up.
Oh, one more point re the main topic: The romanizer of Persian
will have to decide between the formal Perisian rendered by the present script, or the everyday pronunciation,
e.g formal nān-rā mi-juyad vs. nun-o mi-jure 'he's looking for the bread'. Martin Schwartz
Martin Schwartz
Chas Belov said,
April 23, 2025 @ 9:58 pm
@Anh Y: I've never gotten used to Jyutping after three semesters of Cantonese study in the 90's using Yale. Although Yale has the disadvantage of a lack of composed rising and falling tone marks for n and m in Unicode.
Gokul Madhavan said,
April 23, 2025 @ 10:05 pm
A fascinating experiment that brings several thoughts to mind.
First, this Latin script for Persian will remove the pressure of having to learn etymological spellings of Arabic-origin words (“do I write marīz as مريز or مريظ or مريض?”). This can be a feature or a bug, depending on people’s attitudes towards learning Arabic along with Persian.
Second, I can foresee complex effects on the lexical evolution of the language itself. On the one hand, you’re now free to use Arabic-origin words without worrying about their spelling, whereas with the Arabic script you might have decided to write Persian-origin بیمار bīmār instead of Arabic-origin مريض marīz since you couldn’t remember how to spell the latter. But on the other hand, changing the script may also make it psychologically easier to use Persian or French or German words instead of Arabic ones. I skimmed through the manual and it felt (a pure subjective impression) like it used a slightly higher percentage of Persian-origin lexical items than I would have expected. But this may also be influenced by the preferences of the Persian diaspora, many of whom consciously distance themselves from the Islamic Republic of Iran. And since they are more likely than people in Iran to switch to this script, this might in turn affect the lexicon.
(As a sub-point to the above, introducing French or English vocabulary now raises the same kind of spelling question: should the quotidian Persian word for “thanks” be spelled mersī or merci? The logically consistent answer would be to follow Atatürk and go with the pronunciation-based mersī: if we’re going to ignore Arabic etymology, we should ignore French and English as well!)
Third, responding to Martin Schwartz, I would say ¿por qué no los dos? We don’t need to choose between the two; we can switch between formal and informal as determined by context. In fact, we can go further and introduce the majhūl vowels ē and ō into the script to encompass Dari (and Indo-Persian) as well.
Ross Presser said,
April 24, 2025 @ 9:41 am
It's just my pareidolia, but in the 1928 cartoon, when I look at the man delivering the kick, the letters "HM" in his body trunk are right next to his left arm which looks like a "V". Hence "VHM".
J.W. Brewer said,
April 24, 2025 @ 9:46 am
I was curious about whether there were any other Iranian languages currently being written in Latin script under more official auspices, but the best I came up with was a claim on wikipedia that as of approximately 20 years ago it was reported from a source in Azerbaijan that "Tat classes have been started in several schools in the Quba region using an alphabet based on the current Azerbaijani Latin alphabet." There are apparently additional Iranian languages (beyond Tajik) that are at present standardly written in Cyrillic, including Ossetian and Yaghnobi alias Neo-Soghdian.
In the abstract, Cyrillic is a more suitable script than Latin for many IE languages, since Latin has a smaller inventory of basic glyphs, reflecting the comparatively small inventory of phonemes in Classical Latin. But Latin obviously has very strong QWERTY-like path-dependent historical advantages, and Cyrillic additionally suffers from the fact that in recent centuries it has not been newly adopted by or for any language community that was not at the time subject to heavy-handed political domination by Russophones. Many of the post-Soviet "stans" in Central Asia have tried (with various degrees of thoroughness) to shift from Cyrillic to Latin for their official languages in more recent decades. I don't know whether Tajikistan has failed to join that bandwagon because that sort of move has in Central Asia more of a specific "Pan-Turkism" vibe than a general Westernization/modernization vibe, or if there are other factors.