Late Night Post #8

Earth Could Not Answer - by Adelaide Hanscom (1875-1931)

  - by Mohammad Reza Shajarian

This meadow is our happiness just today,
but who will play in the meadow of our dust?

Omar Khayyam

چون ابر به نوروز رخ لاله بشست

بر خیز و به جام باده کن عزم درست

کاین سبزه که امروز تماشا گه توست

فردا همه از خاک تو بر خواهد رست

ابر آمد و زار بر سر سبزه گریست

بی بادۀ گلرنگ نمیشاید زیست

این سبزه که امروز تماشا گه ماست

تا سبزۀ خاک ما تماشا گه کیست

Reference:
Omar Khayyam; the hedonist; the mystic ;the heretic ;the sufi by Sophia Khan
Quatrain 6 by Barney Rickenbacker


Late Night Though

Many years ago I had the habit of walking alone at night through the most obscure of places and through some unexplained innocence I felt protected from any kind of harm. All I had with me was a small poetry book, a CD player and an old mobile phone. During those walks I wrote down my thoughts in the phone in the form of verses, I was in a bubble floating through the streets, I was observing but unperceived. Moments of pure madness in which I declared myself a refugee, a rebel in a world of illusions, a soul forever in conflict with diversions.

Time passed and that teenage rebellion morphed into a strong desire to learn and to know God. Slowly, I was forced to accept this world's cold embrace and bow down to her will. Wherever you go, God is with you.  

Persian Lesson 04 - Adjectives

We use adjectives in order to assign various values to a noun, this may not be the standard definition but neither is this lesson the standard lesson. When we say blue water we assign to the noun "water" another word that links with it and gives us knowledge regarding that particular noun, in our case, the color blue. In Persian, adjectives are added after the noun and connected vocally through an "e". This "e" is only pronounced, not written, so we will have:

آب آبی  ab-e-abi

خوب  good

کتاب  book

کتاب خوب   ketab e chub


We know how to say good book but how to say "the book is good"? Well, this is how (here we no longer pronounce that "e") :
کتاب خوب است

For this we used Simple Present Tense which we will discuss in the next lesson. "Ast" is for third person singular.
To say "this" and "that" in Persian you say:
این  'in'
آن   'an'

این کتاب خوب است  this book is good
آن کتاب خوب است  that book is good

Now it's time for comparative and superlative. For comparative we use تر  and for superlative we add the suffix ین   after the comparative suffix. For example:

زیباتر    more beautiful (than)
زیباترین  most beautiful
or:
جوانتر  younger
جوانترین  youngest

Now let's make some sentences, there is nothing new to learn of how to write a superlative, yet the comparative needs a few things to be mentioned.
این کتاب از آن کتاب خوبتر است
"This book is better than that book". You guessed it, از  is the key to creating a comparative sentence. از  is usually translated as: of, from.

Bellow you have a short list of adjectives, read them, use them, learn them. Till next time,
خداحافظ

Short list of adjectives:

خوب  good

بد  bad

بلند  tall

کوتاه  short

بزرگ  big/large

کوچک  small

تازه  fresh

جوان  young

پیر  old

گران  expensive

ارزان  cheap/inexpensive

سفید  white
 
سیاه  black

قرمز  red

آبی  blue

سبز  green

زرد  yellow

قهوهای  brown

Persian Lesson 03 - Compound Verbs

City of Firuzabad (Gur), Iran,
 founded by Ardashir I

خوش آمدید . Like I said in lesson 2 we will now learn about compound verbs, the vast majority of which are constructed using کردن , like in کار کردن which means to work.
The Simple Present Tense for this verb ( کردن  = to do/create ) is created by deleting the ن , just like in the case of simple verbs. So we will have:

من کار کردم

تو کارکردی

او کار کرد

ما کار کردیم

شما کار کردید

انها کار کردند

As you see only کردن accepts suffixes, other examples:

to call (phone call, phone +to do)	تلفن کردن
to heal (good + to do)	خوب کردن
to cool (cold + to do)	سرد کردن

What you should do now is repeat what I did earlier but with this verbs instead. Try to make sentences after. Here are some more words:

friend = دوست

mother = مدر

father = پدر

sister =خواهر

brother =برادر

sick = بیمار

fruit = میوه

As a bonus I will show you how to say my (something), your (something), etc.
My mother for example will be either مادر من (mader-e-man) or مادرم (maderam).
Your father would be  پدرت  .
His/her brother  برادرش.
I will stop here, no use to go into plurals now. Notice the "e" pronounced but not written when saying "mader-e-man", that is the ezafe, we will talk more about that in another lesson.

With what I showed you previously you can now write phrases like:

او برادرم خوب کرد - He healed my brother.

After you practice this It's time for some more compound verbs.

شدن means "to become". So we can create verbs that have this "becoming" meaning. For example:

to grow up (big + to become)	بزرگ شدن
to get old (old + to become)	پیر شدن
fall in love (love + to become)	عاشق شدن

The last verbs for now are created using دادن which means "to give".

to pay (money + to give)	پول دادن
to kiss(kiss + to give)	بوس دادن
to answer (answer + to give)	جواب دادن

خداحافظ

Persian Lesson 02 - Introduction to Simple Past Tense

 

Image depicting Muhammad, notice
his face is blanked out and
the fire around his head.

Persian verbs are of two types, simple and compound. Simple verbs are like رفتن , to go (infinitive). Compound verbs are usually composed out of two words, we will talk about them in the next lesson, but to satisfy your curiosity I will give the example of: to work: کار کردن.

What is Simple Past? In our case it is: (I, you, he/she/it, we, you, they) went. In Persian the pronouns are (in the same order as before, remember, read from right to left): من . تو . او . ما . شما . آنها . These are read man, to, u, ma, shoma, anha.

To say I went you write من رفتم . Notice that the letter ن  is removed and instead  م  is added. The 'm' letter is to indicate that the one who does the action is 'I', that is why you are not obligated to write  من رفتم and can usually limit yourself to writing: رفتم.

You (singular) went:تو رفتی    -   we add ی
She/he/it went: او رفت   -    we don't add nothing
We went: ما رفتیم    -    we add یم
You (plural) went: شما رفتید    -    we add ید
They went: آنها رفتند    -    we add ند

Learn the suffixes and do the same thing as above to these other verbs:
to see: دیدن
to speak:گُفتن 
to have: داشتَن
to take: گِرِفتِن

Till next time, goodbye (chodahafez): خداحافظ

Persian Lesson 01 - Vowels

Image from Isfahan Bazar

Persian, or Farsi as it is called when referring to the language spoken in Iran, is beautiful and surprisingly easy to learn, once you master the alphabet. It is an Indo-European language, just like almost all European languages (which spread all over the world). Although it makes use of the Arabic alphabet, the two are rather different, Arabic coming from a totally different tree, the Semitic. Persian is considered for centuries, a noble language, mainly because of the impressive poetic and philosophical works written in it.

There are many Persian language lessons on the web, I went through most of them and although my understanding of this language is still rather limited due to vocabulary issues, I decided to share with you some things I discovered along the way. I repeat that I am not a professor of this language and I will only write things I know, which should be enough for beginners and for the intermediate.

First of all, the most difficult part for me have been the vowels. Sure, there are vowels in Persian, here they are:  
- و  -  u, o, and which is actually the letter v. At the beginning of a word it is written after the 'a' (with the 'a' letter not pronounced), for example:  او  which means 'he/she/it' and is pronounced 'u' ;

- ا , آ  -  a, the first form (the one on the left) is used at the beginning of words and it is read 'a', the second form is used at the beginning of words while it can also be used in the middle. When at the beginning it is pronounced more like an 'e/i' or not pronounced at all. For example:  امروز   which means 'today' and is pronounced 'emruz'

- ی -  i, this is the final form of the letter, unlike the first two letters presented here, 'i' can be linked with another letter to the left. For example دیروز   which means 'yesterday' and is pronounced 'diruz' and  آبی (notice the آ )  which means 'blue' and is pronounced 'abi'. In the first case, the letter 'i' is linked with the letter 'r' and in the second example the letter 'i' is presented in its final form.

Now comes the difficult part, Persian, like I said earlier, is an Indo-European language that uses a form of the Arabic alphabet and the result is that not all vowels are written in a word, but they are nonetheless pronounced.

Tajrish bazar, Tehran

Let's try a verb now so I can explain what I mean. 'To go' is  رفتن   and is pronounced 'raeftaen', something more like 'raftan', this is the infinitive form. As you see there are two vowels not written, the one between 'r' and 'f' and between 't' and 'n'.  رَفتَن  See the lines above the 'r' and 't' letters? These help you tell that after the 'r' you will say 'a' and after that 'f', these are not really letters, but more like "short vowel markers" and are rarely used, so be careful. There are another two such signs and I will use the letter 't' to show them.
تِ = t(e)
تُ = t(o) 
We will now make a sentence, anxious?  

او به بازار دیروز رفت

This translates as 'He to bazar yesterday went' or, adapted to English: He went to the bazar yesterday. [U beh bazar diruz raft]. Observe the structure: Subject - Object - Time - Verb. It is in Simple Past Tense

I think it's time to stop now, let me know what you think about this first lesson in the comment box, it is, after all, my first.