As my friends scratch their heads trying to figure out why or how come I don't understand Arabic, I find that time and time again I keep uttering and repeating the same speech over and over and over which is fine, but then I decided I'd rather just write about it and hope that people will read this post.
And so while I love my Arab friends, I don't speak Arabic. While I appreciate the language, I do not
understand it. Just because we are all from the middle east doesn't
mean we speak the same languages. And just because we have similar
scripts, doesn't mean we can read or understand them all either.
I would like to ask the reader one simple question: Can a
french speaker read and understand English without having prior
knowledge of the english language? The ANSWER IS : Probably not! Are they the same
script? Yes! Just like Arabic and Farsi, they are the same script but I can't understand or read it just as a french speaker can't understand or read english and vice versa without having prior knowledge of the language.
So I get this question all the time. Do you like Shawarma? Are you Muslim? I have an Arab friend, you might know him! And that's why I
decided to write this article to help my fellow friends understand the
differences, and learn to appreciate both languages distinctly and in
their own ways.
I think Wikepedia does a great job at explaining what is the Iranian (Farsi) Language:
"Persian
(فارسی, IPA: [fɒːɾˈsiː]) is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian
branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran,
Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under
Persian influence. The Persian language is classified as a continuation
of Middle Persian, the official religious and literary language of
Sassanid Persia, itself a continuation of Old Persian, the language of
Persian Empire in the Achaemenid era.[2][3][4] Persian is a pluricentric
language and its grammar is similar to that of many contemporary
European languages.[5]
Persian has ca. 110 million native
speakers, holding official status respectively in Iran, Afghanistan and
Tajikistan. For centuries Persian has also been a prestigious cultural
language in Central Asia, South Asia, and Western Asia.[6]
Persian
has had a considerable influence on neighboring languages, particularly
the Turkic languages in Central Asia, Caucasus, and Anatolia,
neighboring Iranian languages, as well as Armenian, Arabic and other
languages. It has also exerted a strong influence on South Asian
languages, especially Urdu, as well as Hindi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Saraiki,
Sylheti, Bengali, Oriya.[2][5][7][8][9][10]
With a long history of
literature in the form of Middle Persian before Islam, Persian was the
first language in Muslim civilization to break through Arabic’s
monopoly on writing, and the writing of poetry in Persian was
established as a court tradition in many eastern courts.[6] Some of the
famous works of Persian literature are the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, works of Rumi (Molana), Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Divan of Hafiz and poems of Saadi."
"The Persian Alphabet" (NOTE: this is where most people become confused):
The Persian or Perso-Arabic
alphabet (Persian: الفبای فارسی) is a writing system based on the
Arabic script. Originally used exclusively for the Arabic language, the
Arabic alphabet was adapted to the Persian language, adding four
letters: پ [p], چ [t͡ʃ], ژ [ʒ], and گ [ɡ]. Many languages which use the
Perso-Arabic script add other letters. Besides the Persian alphabet
itself, the Perso-Arabic script has been applied to the Urdu alphabet,
Sindhi alphabet, Saraiki alphabet, Kurdish Sorani alphabet, Lurish
(Luri), Ottoman Turkish alphabet, Balochi alphabet, Punjabi Shahmukhi
script, Tatar, Azeri, and several others.
In order to represent
non-Arabic sounds, new letters were created by adding dots, lines, and
other shapes to existing letters. For example, the retroflex sounds of
Urdu are represented orthographically by adding a small ط above their
non-retroflex counterparts: د [d̪] and ڈ [ɖ]. The voiceless retroflex
fricative [ʂ] of Pashto is represented in writing by adding a dot above
and below the س [s] letter, resulting in ښ. The close central rounded
vowel [ʉ] of Kurdish is written by writing two ﻭ [u], resulting in ﻭﻭ.
The
Perso-Arabic script is exclusively written cursively. That is, the
majority of letters in a word connect to each other. This is also
implemented on computers. Whenever the Perso-Arabic script is typed,
the computer connects the letters to each other. Unconnected letters
are not widely accepted. In Perso-Arabic, as in Arabic, words are
written from right to left while numbers are written from left to
right.
A characteristic feature of this script, possibly tracing
back to Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, is that vowels are
underrepresented. For example, in Classical Arabic, of the six vowels,
the three short ones are normally omitted entirely (except in the
Qur'an), while the three long ones are represented ambiguously by
certain consonants. Only Kashmiri, Uyghur and Kurdish, of the many
languages using adaptations of this script, regularly indicate all
vowels.
An
author by by the name of Thomas Kayes on a website I found while doing a
google search understood pretty well the differences between Arabic and
Farsi, so it might give you insight on the differences, here it is:
The Difference Between Iranians And Arabs
Useless knowledge ^ | 02/07/05 | Thomas Kayes
Posted on Mon Feb 7 16:53:33 2005 by freedom44
"Many
Americans seem to entertain the illusion that Iranians are Arabs. This
may be due to the fact that many people in both communities practise
Islam, which I'll mention below. Another coincidence that may have
contributed to this confusion is the apparent similarity of the names
Iran and Iraq. It is true that the Persian language and the Arabic
share the same alphabet, namely the Arabic alphabet, which was imposed
upon the Iranians centuries ago. But originally Persian had its own
alphabet. Anyway, in Arabic script the names of the countries are
entirely different, 'Iraq' beginning with the letter 'ain' and 'Iran'
beginning with the letter 'alif'. The words 'Iranian' and 'Persian' are
virtually synonymous, the former being the preferred term nowadays.
The Arabic word 'Iraq' means 'Veins' and, apparently, refers to the Euphrates and the Tigris Rivers.
But
the clincher is that the word 'Iran' is cognate with the English word
'Aryan', as the Iranians are Aryan, that is, Indo-European, while the
Arabs, as is well known, are Semitic, so ethnologically there's a
definite disjunction. The Indo-European languages, which probably
coincide in fair measure with ethnicity, are divided into Centum and
Satem groups. Centum languages further divide into Germanic, Italic,
Celtic and Greek, while Satem languages divide into Balto-Slavic,
Indo-Iranian, Albanian and Armenian. Thus we find among Indo-European
languages such widely divergent specimens as English, German, Spanish,
French, Greek, Russian, Persian (Farsi), Hindi and many others. There
are a great number of Arabic loan words in Persian, just as there are a
great number of Latin loan words in English, but no one classifies
English as an Italic language, nor should anyone classify Persian as a
Semitic language. There are Persian loan words in Arabic too, but
etymological dictionaries of the Arabic language are scarce, if they
exist at all, and one is often left guessing which words might be from
Persian.
Semitic languages are a subgroup of Afro-Asiatic
languages. Only two strictly Semitic languages survive--Arabic and
Hebrew. Extinct Semitic languages include Assyrian, Phoenician, Aramaic
and others. Among languages in other subgroups of the Afro-Asiatic
languages are Amharic, Tigrinya and Hausa of Ethiopia, Chad and Nigeria.
This
ethno-linguistic disjunction is not merely an academic hypothesis. I
have met many, many Arabs and Iranians, and there is a definite Arab
look and a definite Iranian look. It's not infallible, of course, but I
think I could probably tell them apart 75% of the time.
But even
more conclusive is the historical aspect. Now we know that all ethnic
groups must have sprung from primitive human beings, so likely they're
all of great antiquity. But when we speak of 'history', we generally
mean written records. And here we see that Persians appear on the scene
much in advance of Arabs.
Generally, Persian history is
said to have begun with King Cyrus the Great, who unified Persia and
conquered vast tracts of land. He is also famous for liberating the Jews
from captivity in Babylon around 538 BC, as is amply recorded in the
Bible, in the Books of Isaiah, Daniel and Ezra. The next four Persian
kings were Cambyses, Darius, Xerxes and Artaxerxes, all in the Bible.
These names are all in the Greco-English spellings. Xerxes, whose name
is Khashayarsha in Persian, Achashverosh in Hebrew and Ahasuerus in the
English Bible, is vividly portrayed in the Book of Esther as the
rescuer of the Jews from the persecutions of Haman, which is celebrated
to this day by Jews as Purim, the Feast of Lots. All of these kings
are also famous for their exploits in the Middle East, Anatolia, Greece
and Egypt. Much later, another Persian king, Shapur I, defeated the
Roman emperor, Valerian. And their have been many, many others.
In
antiquity, Persia had various religious, such as Zoroastrianism,
Mithraism, Mazdaism and Manichaeism, all to be largely supplanted by
Islam. A more recent Iranian religion is the Baha'i faith.
As
far as I know, the Arabs enter history around 305 AD, with the
Nabataean Inscriptions, but these are scant. Their real entrance into
history was the appearance of Mohammed (570-632 AD) Arabs conquered
Persia in the seventh century, spreading Islam. Subsequently, in the
10th and 11th century, Turks took over the leadership of Islam, so
Islamic history is not strictly the same thing as Arabic history. In
the coming centuries Islam would extend its sway all the way from China
and Indonesia to Spain. But the Ottoman Empire, once the world's
greatest power, was a Turkish, rather than Arabic or Persian, Islamic
Sultanate.
So Iranians are definitely not Arabs.
Source: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1338091/posts
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