Apparently lots of Lebanese learning Persian
Thursday, October 23, 2008
A 5 piastre coin of Greater Lebanon, 1924Here's an article I missed from a bit over a week ago:
Iran's cultural attache in Lebanon has said that hundreds of students in the country are learning Persian language.
Speaking to IRNA on Wednesday, Mohammad Hossein Raeiszadeh added that Persian language courses have been arranged at the guidance and high school levels in Al-Mahdi schools affiliated to Hezbollah.
Persian is a language that is not only easier to learn than most think, but would be especially easy for a person from Lebanon considering the same script as well as the prevalence of French in the country, as Persian has quite a few French loanwords such as abat-jour (âbâjur, lamp), billet (belit, ticket), timbre (tambr, stamp), theatre (te'âtr), garçon (gârson), pronunciation of the Western months of the year, etc. I don't know the exact number of French loanwords but it seems to be about the same amount as those present in Turkish. I'd like to see some real numbers on the number of Lebanese learning Persian, but considering simply ease of learning vs. real use, it would probably be a pretty easy sell.
4 comments:
All those French words exist in Portuguese too: abajur, bilhete, timbre, teatro, garçom. With the exception of "teatro", all of them were directly borrowed from French.
I guess the presence of such French words in so disparate languages would afford them the status of "international words" and thus maybe make them eligible for Interlingua. :)
Persian ... would be especially easy for a person from Lebanon considering the same script as well as the prevalence of French in the country, as Persian has quite a few French loanwords
Well, you're leaving out the most important factor: about 40% of Persian's massive vocabulary is derived from Arabic, which is far, far more than the few dozen French loanwords. Naturally, while not all Lebanese speak French, just about all of them speak Arabic.
Perhaps I should have clarified that I meant the extra French words in addition to all the loanwords from Arabic in Persian.
Hi. Here you can see a list of French loanwords in Persian. Some of them are obsolete, though e.g. acteur which has been replaced with bazigær; or appliqué that I have never seen it being used in Persian. Persian doesn't have a notable amount of loanwords from French but they are very essential and are used in everyday life. Persian has just notable loanwords from Arabic (which has various reasons) and not any other language, even Turkic ones.
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