RFC 4645bis: making 'pes' and 'prs' extlangs

Randy Presuhn randy_presuhn at mindspring.com
Fri Dec 5 23:31:05 CET 2008


Hi -

> From: "John Cowan" <cowan at ccil.org>
> To: "Randy Presuhn" <randy_presuhn at mindspring.com>
> Cc: <ietf-languages at iana.org>
> Sent: Friday, December 05, 2008 12:29 PM
> Subject: Re: RFC 4645bis: making 'pes' and 'prs' extlangs
...
> This question was put to the official institution FARHANGESTAN (Persian
> Language and Literature Academy in Tehran) by the Commerce Department
> for Australia, at Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In their 34th
> meeting on 7th of December 1992, the Persian Academy unanimously passed
> the resolution that this language must be called PERSIAN and the reasons
> given were:
...
> 3- It may also give the impression that FARSI is a dialect of some parts
> of Iran and not the predominant (official) language of this country.

That's an argument for calling it "Iranian", not "Persian!".  :-)  But let's *not* go there!
 
> 4- Fortunately, FARSI has never been used in any research paper or
> university document in any Western language and the proposal of its usage
> will create doubt and ambiguity about the name of the official language
> of our country.

And that's simply untrue.  I learned how "Farsi" was an Indo-european language
in an introductory linguistics course as an undergrad.   But I had heard
the word (and the language) much earlier. When I was a youngster in
rural Minnesota, our family doctor was from Iran, and that was what he
called the language his family spoke at home.  But never mind, since
re-hashing the debates here would accomplish little.

However, a more serious question is what resources to consider in
deciding what the English name of a language is.  In my little corner
of the world I've gone for decades thinking the English word was
"Farsi," and that is what my Iranian-American and Iranian-British
friends have consistently called it. One might even go so far as to
argue "Who are these FARHANGESTAN folks to dictate English
usage?  Do we tell them what to call English in their language?"

But as a practical matter, just following the ISO source documents
seems simplest and most consistent, and leave the debates to
the ISO folks.

Randy



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