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

[Roozbeh Pournader]

Randy Presuhn wrote:
>> 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.

Well, you are reading a phrase written by a Persian as it was written by 
Westerner. When we say "any", or "never", we don't mean 100% of the 
time, we usually mean 90% or something ;-)

> 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?"

The Indians and the Chinese had been telling the world people what to 
call their cities in English for quite a while now, and the world is 
doing that (remember Peking, Bombay, and Madras?) This has also been 
tried with language names (Sinhala vs Sinhalese) or country names. (This 
is usually the other way around, with local names preferred over 
establish English names.)

The Persian Academy tried to do similar, and continues to. Of course the 
Persian Academy only answered because the Australian government asked 
the Iranian government, and the Iranian government had no one else to 
turn to, other than the Academy. In other words, someone asked them, and 
they told their preference. I don't think the Academicians believe they 
can mandate something for non-Iranians.

Best,
Roozbeh