Language and Culture in Persian lies at the intersection of what we ordinarily associate with language learning, standard vocabulary, idiom, grammar, etc. and a set of shared assumptions about the world that we call “culture.” The book is about what readers of Persian know but rarely express. It asks the question: What understandings do readers share that enable them to comprehend skillful writing in the language? Common sense of this sort comes in two ways:
explicitly in the form of the alphabet,
morphology, syntax, punctuation, and
other obvious aspects of writing, and
implicitly in the form of a shared set of basic facts and ideas that allows readers to construct the meanings of texts.
Language and Culture in Persian is a full course in Persian Lite. It offers sophisticated insights into the language without requiring months of laborious study. The book will interest both general readers and language specialists, especially autodidacts who want to learn about the languages and cultures of the modern Middle East and Central Asia but do not have time for formal language instruction. The type of language and culture awareness the book promotes not only helps one understand the way millions of people communicate in Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and Tajikistan, but it also fosters an awareness of basic features of Arabic, Hindi, Kashmiri, Pashto, and other languages that have either contributed to the development of modern Persian or have been influenced by it.
The book also addresses certain fallacies about the nationality of the language. Not a text of Farsi or Dari or Tojiki, Language and Culture in Persian avoids linguistic partisanship, drawing a picture of the language that retains its clarity and color wherever it is used. At the same time, it also distinguishes Persian writing from other languages that appear in the dotted, toothed, and curved calligraphic dress of “Oriental” or “Islamic” script, what most people—even, as explained in the Introduction of the book, scholars of literacy—associate with Arabic.
While never the last word on any Persian-related subject, Language and Culture in Persian raises many topics that will not lose their topicality for years and years to come. It begins sensibly with one of Persian’s most durable opening lines, the first in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh [benam-e khodavan-e jan-o-kherad], and ends with Rushdie-species and other breeds of “blasphemy” that continue to absorb almost all users of the language.
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