Musings of Compound Verbs

I was taking some notes and memorizing verbs. My note cards for last night were this:

nevestan (to write) [نِوِشتَن] - 書く (かく)

xaandan (to read) [خواندَن] - 読む (よむ)

zendegi kardan (to live, inhabit) [زِندِگى كَردَن] - 住んでいる (すんでいる)


In PRSN 101 at SFSU, we're using "An Introuction to Persian" by W.M. Thackston [ISBN 978-0-936347-29-5]. It is in Chapter 7, we get to learn about compound verbs, similar to an English verb, "to pick up", where a verb is combined with a non-verbal element to form the verb.

In Korean and Japaense, the mechanism works with the verb "to do" in Korean (hada) and Japnese (suru), such as "to work" (일해요;仕事する) and "to study" (공부해요;勉強する), which are kaar [كار] and dars-xaandan [درس خواندَن] (lit. lesson read).

No Arabic with Office 2011 on Mac

Essentially what I would like to do is type vocabulary lists of both Arabic and Persian in something like a spread sheet. Unfortunately, on a Macintosh, this is quite difficult to do.

I tried out the latest and greatest MS OFfice 2011 on the Mac OS X, and still, it does not support the script. Simply put, Microsoft does not support the complete Unicode standard in regards to Arabic/Persian scripts.

What does this mean for Mac users? Well, unfortunately, we'll have to resort to running Windows with something like Parrallels. For my vocabulary lists, I can use Excel from Office 2010 in this virtual environment.

Persian Pronouns

Small chart I created to show some of the pronouns.

Like Romance languages, the plural form of you, can be used to express formality or politeness and respect.  Thus, SHOMA can be used for polite form of saying you for one person (singular).  Likewise, ISHAN is used to express polite form of he and she.

Persian Speaking Countries

I created this little graphic on my Macintosh to document the Persian speaking countries Tajikistan (تاجيکستان), Afghanistan (افغانستان), and Iran (ايران).  Within those countries they call the language Tajiki (تاجيکى), Dari (درى) meaning court (دربار) language, and Farsi or more correctly Parsi (پارسى).

Arabic Pronoun Basics

I found these pronouns in my book, and so here they are:

There are actually many more pronouns, total of 12, so consider this a starter set of pronouns for Arabic.  The ANTA and ANTI are used for speaking with male and female respectively.

I just noticed the graphic I created (using Open Office on the Mac), I spelled HUYA using the wrong vowel marker; I'll fix it later.

Short Vowels of Arabic

The first thing that threw me off is the short vowels.  In Arabic script, short vowels are implied typically, so words are spelled with consonants.  For teaching words or reading religious texts, there are diacritical marks used to denote the proper sound of the consonant with the implicit short vowel:

• the fatḥa (فتحة‎‎) appears as [ـَ] and represents a short short /a/.  
• This sounds like the a in cat. 
• Arabic example: <دَ> /da/.
• the kasra (كسرة) appears as [ـِ] and represents a short /i/.  
• This is like the sound of i in sit.  
• Arabic example: <دِ> /di/.
• the ḍamma (ضمة) appears as [ـُ] and represents a short /u/. 
• This is like the sound of u in put.  
• Arabic example: <دُ> /du/.

For speakers of Spanish or Japanese, these will be unique sounds.  This sort of threw me off as I typically used Spanish as a platform to learn other languages, transliterating the sounds to match Spanish phonology, which won't help in this case.

New Discoveries

I started this blog as I was crazy to take the plunge into Indo-Aryan and Semitic languages.  The Indo-Aryan includes languages like Pashto, Persian, Hindi, and Urdu, and Semitic languages are Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic, and Tigrinya.

I am currently studying Persian and Arabic at the same time.  Yes, I know, I'm totally crazy and I totally agree.  These languages, or at least the Arabic script Naskh (نسخ) is hard, as the implicit short-vowels totally threw me off.  My mind is starting to absorb them and from this I am gaining inspiration.  I think the script is rather beautiful and mystical.