{"id":68939,"date":"2025-04-22T05:48:51","date_gmt":"2025-04-22T10:48:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=68939"},"modified":"2025-04-22T05:48:51","modified_gmt":"2025-04-22T10:48:51","slug":"latinized-persian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=68939","title":{"rendered":"Latinized Persian"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of my favorite photographs shows Kemal Ataturk<\/a> (1881-1938) teaching the alphabet to citizens:<\/p>\r\n

<\/a>\r\n
Mustafa Kemal<\/a> introducing the new Turkish alphabet to the people of Kayseri<\/a>, 20 September 1928<\/figcaption>\r\n<\/figure>\r\n

<\/p>\r\n

Here are some other scenes from that period of language reform in Turkey:<\/p>\r\n

<\/a>\r\n
A cartoon published by Ramiz G\u00f6k\u00e7e in Akbaba<\/a><\/i> on 13 August 1928, depicting the reformist period.<\/figcaption>\r\n<\/figure>\r\n
<\/a>\r\n
Two Turks exploring the new alphabet displayed on the poster outside the municipal building, 1928.<\/figcaption>\r\n<\/figure>\r\n

(\"Turkish alphabet reform<\/a>\", Wikipedia)<\/p>\r\n

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.<\/p>\r\n

\"Persian Latin standard — Standardizing the Persian Latin script<\/a>\", fias (Federative Institute for Advanced Study)<\/p>\r\n

The enormous and rich civilization of the consortium Iran\u2014Afghanistan\u2014Tajikistan 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<\/a> Arabic script used to represent the otherwise Indo-European language. Not only doesn\u2019t it provide for broad dissemination in non-specialist masses, but also disimproves the specialists\u2019 and dedicated learners\u2019 experience in productive language use in the modern era governed by the Latin script.<\/p>\r\n

While the Arabic script is omnipresent in the region and while its Persian recension<\/a> is granted even constitutionally (Art. 15 of the Constitution of the IRI<\/a>) the prerogative to transcribe any of the numerous languages<\/a> 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<\/a> of the Transcription procedure for Iranian toponymic items<\/a> that has been subsequently<\/a> adopted and approved by the United Nations in 2012<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n

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\u00a0Iranian Society in Frankfurt, by Dr. Hamid Farroukh: Alefb\u0101-ye 2om: a parallel script for the Persian language<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\r\n

The Persian Latin script movement has many projects for advancing its aims.\u00a0 One is the:<\/p>\r\n

Persian manual<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\r\n

M\u0101 f\u0101rsi balad\u2010im!<\/strong> \u2018we know \/ speak Persian<\/em>\u2019 is an open source Persian manual by Hamid Farroukh<\/a>, PhD serving at the Iranian Society in Frankfurt (Germany).<\/p>\r\n

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 \u201cLingua latina per se illustrata\u201d by Hans H. \u00d8rberg.<\/p>\r\n

The project maintains that the Latin script for the Persian language is not a \u201cromanization\u201d. The detailed argument against this deprecated naming will be described in a future link<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n

Selected readings<\/b><\/p>\r\n