Arabic, Persian, and in between

0 Hi Ali, 02br
00Sorry for the delay in the replying to your mail. First of all, thanks a lot for your patience with me. And the second, here comes the sweet discussion of the influence of the Arabic language over Persian! It's quite interesting for me that there are many among the Westerners who think that we speak Arabic (and we dress, et cetra, the same way, since we are Arabs too), and now I'm quite shocked that you do not know how much our language is affected by Arabic after Islam. 02br
00Persian is different from Urdu, though they are from the same origin. In fact, I've noticed a lot of words that are in use in both of the languages, though with a slightly different pronounciation, and sometimes with different meanings. Because as you know, languages are always changing, so a word that was spoken by two people who were originally from the same place and then migrated to different places( like Urdu and Persian), or a word that had been borrowed by a language from another, that had the same meaning once (as the Persian-Arabic case) continue to change in different directions, semanticly and phoneticly. 02br
00As you know, Arabs ruled over Iran for centuries(I think for about 400 years), and Arabic was the official language during that time (the language of the government, of course, and also some scientists, philosophers,... wrote their books in Arabic so that they could survive and passed on to the next generations, like Bin-Sina's (Abu Ali Sina's) works.) By reviving of the Iranian kings, the official language shifted to Persia, though the writing system, and plenty of Arabic words along with it, remained within the Persian language system. There were times that Persian was far from "Persian", and we can't understand the texts from that era easily( it even went that far that they started to form plural forms of the Persian nouns by adding Arabic plural affix "-At", borrowing grammatical rules from another language is a disaster to any language), and also times that there were massive efforts to kick the Arabic words out! (Both of them were, and are wrong.) 02br
00Anyway, that's why I can understand simple Arabic texts, though I'm a little bit better than most of my fellow countrypeople. 02br
00And teaching Arabic as a part of curriculum at schools started after the revolution. So, I've studied most of the Arabic grammar rules, though I hardly remember them.But the teaching method and materials were not good enough, they forced us to memorize the rules without knowing the differences or the necessary details. For example, though I still can conjugate all the 8 BABs of THALATHI MAZID (if I'm not mistaken), I don't know where EFT'AL should be used and where ENFE'AL! 02br
00I'd like to learn Arabic, I think that I have the talent, and I was top of my class at school. But I have nobody to practise my Arabic with them. I hope that I'll find the strngth to learn it by myself someday! 02br
00Cheers, 0-