Purity or Realism? The Dispute between Linguists and Linguistic Purists in Iran

8/9/2019 Purity or Realism? The Dispute between Linguists and Linguistic Purists in Iran

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Purity or Realism?The Dispute between Linguists and Linguistic Purists in IranCritical texts devoted to maintaining the purity of Persian are very popular inIran. Linguistic criticism has gone through several phases, and now representat

ives of modern linguistics are resisting defenders of the language and taking the discussion in a new direction.

The first phase of this traditionalist upholding of Persian was almost entirelylimited to combating loanwords from Arabic and to keeping the language free of foreign elements. The assumption was that replacing Arabic words would solve theproblems of Persian.

One of the first representatives of this way of thinking was Prince Jalaluddin Mirza, son of Fathali Shah (1243-89), who engaged in an exchange of ideas with Fathali Akhundzadeh, the celebrated Azerbaijani dramatist, thinker, and fervent opponent of using Arabic words and script in Persian. The Prince also wrote a bookon the history of Iran, using a purist style for the presentation of his patrio

tic ideals. This he called The Book of Kings, after Ferdausi.

The programmatic work begun with this book remained unfinished because of the Princes early death. However, it was not forgotten and attracted a great response. People such as Ebrahim Pourdavud, Ahmad Kasravi, Zabih Behruz, Mohammad Moghaddam and Sadegh Kia continued his work, unsatisfied with anything less than a language purified of all loanwords. The activities of the two Academies of Languageduring the Pahlavi period were somewhat more conservative and circumspect, but

more or less pursued the same approach.

The emotional and exaggerated trend towards the elimination of foreign words (especially those of Arabic origin) from the Persian language persisted until recent decades. It could be observed both in studies by specific groups and also to some extent in the publications of administrative, university, and cultural institutes.

Persian is not a scholarly language

The purist attitude towards language continues to encounter harsh criticism: inthe past from writers and thinkers who made use of a Persian that included loanwords from the Arabic, and today from linguists who reject such an approach as unscientific and contrary to the natural development of language. Linguists oftenrefer to the English language, because todays Persian almost exclusively adoptsEnglish rather than Arabic words. They ascertain that more than any other langu

age English has always adopted words, from French, Latin, Greek, even from Persian and Arabic, and has itself now become a donor language because English dominates thinking in most scholarly subjects. So what is at issue is not an incapacity implicit in the Persian language, but rather an incapacity to think in this la

nguage. The historical fact it is maintained is that the Persian language was not a scholarly language before modern times. During the first centuries of the Islamic period Iranian scholars wrote in Arabic, and their successors, who gradually started to write in Persian, used the same specialist Arabic terminology.However, the mature language of mysticism and the images used in Persian poetrydemonstrate that the language does inherently possess the capacity to give expr

ession to thoughts developed in Persian.

What particularly annoys linguists in this discussion is the purists ahistorical way of looking at what is at issue. The purists are charged with leaving out of account the historical development of words and all their associated connotations, with banishing them from Persian and wanting to create another language. Not every borrowing damages the recipient language, say their critics as can be

seen from the European languages. They only adopted words, which are on the surface of language. The same is true of Persian, with only a few exceptions. However, the situation changes when such fundamental elements as grammar or linguistic


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structure are adopted. Over the long term, they say, that would destroy a languages structure. Fortunately, though, languages resist that kind of borrowing. Even though there has been give and take between Arabic and Persian for several hundred years, neither has adopted missing sounds from the other. Constant contact with European languages has not resulted in Persian tolerating an accumulationof consonants around a syllable nor has this happened in Arabic or Turkish. I

n addition, centuries of linguistic contact with Arabic have not led to gender d

istinctions being applied to nouns and verbs. Both writers and linguists believethat exceptions such as Arabic plurals should be avoided wherever possible. ThePersian language tends in that direction without such recommendations for ins

tance, if there is congruence between adjective and noun. That is also largely avoided, apart from certain idiomatic expressions.

The establishment of Academies of Language and the propagation of a language policy rejecting the use of foreign words were among the reforms introduced by Reza Shah, following the example of Atatrk. The difference was that in Turkey linguistic purism took on extreme forms and the language was largely cleansed ofloanwords from the Arabic and Persian. Turkey even implemented a second project,the introduction of the Latin alphabet, which was for a time also discussed in

Iran. Turkish experience of these reforms was not always positive. After two generations Turks could not read the literature of the past (as if the centuries ofthe Ottoman Empire had never been), nor were they capable of understanding publ

ications by other Turkic peoples, since Stalin had also imposed writing reforms and introduced the Cyrillic alphabet. As the newly-introduced alphabets were constructed almost phonetically, and the pronunciation predominant in each peoples capital city was used for this phonetic approach, the written link between the Turkic peoples was broken. Before these reforms, when a newspaper was published in Constantinople in Arabic script, Turks who were able to read could understand it from the Balkans to Kyrgyzstan. This Arabic script did not indicate the short vowels and the difference between certain consonants, but both of these appeared in the phonetic script. Iran had once also broken with its ancient tradition when the Arabic script was introduced, with the result that it did not wish to

repeat the experience.

Nevertheless, the Turkish experience was not entirely negative. One of the successes of language policy there was activation of the elements for the formation of new Turkish words, which prepared the language for the age of science and technology: a bold enterprise that is also recommended by some Iranian linguists.The campaign against infiltration through translation

The second phase of criticism concerned words and phrases which found their wayinto Persian through translation. These are not borrowed words but rather borrowed coinages where an expression in another language is translated, element for element, into the recipient language. Traditionalists hold this treatment of language responsible for the decline of the language and criticise translators whenever a chance arises. Criticism of translation is not our concern here, and it isnot the concern of defenders of the language either. They charge translators wi

th other misdemeanours:

1. When a translator introduces a new word to replace a well-known specialised term. Here traditionalists and linguists are even in agreement. However, the latter believe that if the content of science changes, old terms referring to different subject matter cannot be used for new concepts. For instance, existential philosophy and the grammar of generative transformation require their own terminology.

2. When a translator introduces a new expression by way of a borrowed translatio

n, traditionalists resist this on the grounds that such terms are absent in Irans thousand years of literature. Here too linguists are of the opinion that thisobjection cannot be generally applied. Khosrow Farshidvar, a Tehran university


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professor, has published an extensive list of translations into Persian from Arabic, English, and French, making this available for discussion. It seems that critics have no objection to borrowed translations from Arabic since these have been incorporated in Persian to such an extent that only specialists are able to recognise their origin. So such objections mainly relate to translators Euromania. In this case too aversion to neologisms depends on the extent to which theyhave been incorporated into everyday language. Persian translations of such exp

ressions as birthday, Have a good trip, Im pleased to see you, surname,green light, and railway, which did not previously exist, are not resisted.Yet renderings of such expressions as to count on someone, My God, to openfire, and considerable are regarded as invented. The representative of this

group is Abolhassan Nadshafi, a well-known writer and translator, whose criticalglosses appeared in a much-acclaimed book entitled Let Us Not Write Incorrectly

, intended as a kind of dictionary of problematic issues in Persian. Traditionalists were full of praise for this book, while linguists such as Mohammad Reza Bateni and Ali Mohammad Haghshenas were of the absolute opposite opinion. Bateni subjected Nadshafi to critical analysis in a series of articles headed Allow UsTo Write Incorrectly and Much Ado about Nothing (itself a borrowed translation of one of Shakespeares comedies). He came to the conclusion that this book wa

s not the work of a scholar of language and that it was scarcely imaginable a linguist would make such a fool of himself. Bateni continues: This book sets outfrom the false assumption that language does not, and should not, change In MrNadshafis view the language of the past is its noble and pure form, and all th

e linguistic innovations and changes that have occurred in our time are obvioussigns of confusion, leading to degeneration of our forefathers unblemished tongue. Clearly this denies the essence and function of language. Precisely such transformations led to Ancient Persian becoming Middle Persian, and Middle PersianNew Persian. Romance languages such as French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian etc.arose out of Latin All of that got under way with the kind of little changes

that purists now call innovation, linguistic confusion, and degeneration. In Batenis opinion, avoidance of new coinages leads to a desiccation of language.He says that one of the most important processes for the linguistic mastering of

modern scientific challenges is the activation of the elements within the language for the formation of new words. He comes to the conclusion that, contrary towhat its defenders assert, the Persian language is not threatened and has devel

oped in accordance with the requirements of our times.

What linguists write about this only reaches a relatively small group of people,whereas critics of todays language speak to the general public. Scholarly crit

icism of Nadshafis book could not stop several editions attracting enthusiasticreaders and imitators. One of the latter was Yussef Aali Abbas Abad, whose Dict

ionary of Correct Writing is dedicated to Abolhassan Nadshafi as follows: He isjustly among the avant-garde in the renaissance of correct writing, purificatio

n of the Persian language, and preservation of these pillars of Iranian nationalidentity. This book is mainly based on his ideas.

Nevertheless, in the long term the linguists response was not without an impact, since, unlike his role model, Aali Abbas Abad takes the language of contemporary literature as his standard, and in so doing accepts the development of language, at least up to the present day.Persian as Iranians national identity?

While the discussion about purification of the language continues in Iran, withtraditionalists making national identity and even solidarity between Persian-speaking countries dependent upon it, the problem is emerging among the non-Persianpeoples of Iran and Afghanistan in another, explosive form. These peoples belie

ve that their non-Persian mother tongue is a mark of identity, and in Iran they

are claiming the right to be taught in this language, as is guaranteed in the Constitution of the Islamic Republic but which after three decades has still not been implemented. Paragraph 15 of this Constitution declares: The shared languag


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e, spoken and written, of the Iranian people is Persian. Official documents, correspondence, texts, and schoolbooks must be in Persian. However, use of other native languages and dialects is permitted alongside Persian in the press and other media, as well as in teaching their literature in schools. Protests against the failure to grant this constitutional right have intensified since 1999 when UNESCO made February 21st the Day of the Mother Tongue.

In this matter too there are differences of opinion between linguists and traditionalists. Ali Mohammad Haghshenas, the well-known linguist and lexicographer, says that any assertion of the superiority of one language over others is nothingother than racism. Mohammad Reza Bateni is of the opinion that national identit

y cannot be defined by a single language, since multilingualism is more the rule in the world than an exception. The learning of a mother tongue says Bateni does not lead to the break-up of a multi-ethnic state, but to the neglect of

these peoples prosperity.

In view of the fact that the non-Persian peoples of Iran amount to over half thepopulation, and some of them especially the Azeris provided the countrys p

olitical and military leadership for much of its long history, it is surprising

that their language was not used for teaching alongside the national language. Is this just an outcome of Persian chauvinism, as some extremist representativesof these peoples claim? Historical testimony does not support that assertion. Both the Azeri Turks and other Turkic tribes ruled over this country for centuries. The Pahlavi period is just a brief episode compared with this long history. Not even all the members of the Pahlavi family were Persians. The religious leaderof the Islamic Republic of Iran is an Azeri. How can the supposed Persian chauv

inism have oppressed them? The court of Mahmoud Ghaznavi, the first Turkish ruler of Iran, was simply swarming with Persian-speaking poets. Did anyone force Nizami, Khagani, or Saeb-e Tabrizi to write in Persian instead of their mother tongue? Did anyone compel Mawlana Rumi, who lived in the Turkish-speaking part of the Seljuk Empire and merely travelled across Iran in order to reach Konya, to write his poems in Persian? Why did Shahriar, who was able to create a masterpiece

like Heydar Baba in Azeri-Turkish, acclaimed by Azeris on both sides of the border, nevertheless write most of his poems in Persian? In the case of the Azeris,at least, this state of affairs seems to be an outcome of neglect of their own language rather than of Persian oppression, since when they could their own language, which they could during their eight hundred years of dominance in Islamic Iran, they devoted more attention to Persian as did the Mughal rulers of India.The other side of the coin

The upholders of a pure mother tongue in Afghanistan also behave like Iranians.In January 2008 the countrys Minister of Information and Culture reprimanded anAfghan Television reporter for having used Persian neologisms for faculty anduniversity instead of the usual words borrowed from Pashtu. The Minister call

ed these foreign words and said the reporters behaviour was against culturaland Islamic principles. Calling Persian words in Dari foreign aroused the di

spleasure of Persian-speaking Afghans, Tajiks, and Iranians. These neologisms have been formed out of living elements in the Persian language, since of course what is designated did not exist in these peoples shared past. However, present-day requirements mean that they have also been accepted on the other side of theIranian border. Now Iranian traditionalists are playing the role of linguists w

ith regard to an Afghan problem, while the Kabul government has taken on the role of establishing linguistic norms. Over the longer term this government will remain as unsuccessful in this as its Iranian counterparts, failing to prevent theacceptance of Persian words formed in Iran. The fact is that speakers of Afghanvariants of Persian are not sufficiently inventive to master the linguistic dem

ands of a new age.Manutschehr Amirpurwas born in Iran, lives today in Germany, and has worked for many years as a Farsi-German interpreter. He is responsible for the Persian edition of Art&Thought.


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Translated by Tim NevillCopyright: Goethe-Institut e. V., Fikrun wa FannJune 2009

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Purity or Realism? The Dispute between Linguists and Linguistic Purists in Iran