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.