A case of Language Planning for Persian
23 Feb 2016A few days ago I watched a lecture by Dr. Mohammadreza Bateni titled: language planning. In this video he proposed that we change the writing system of Persian from Arabic to Latin.
Image from: freelanguage.org
There were several issues that came to my mind regarding this proposal that I would like to mention: First of all Persian is a rich language in term of vocabulary. Most of Persian vocabularies come from Arabic roots and as you might know Arabic language has several Bons with which you can make up new words. Like… A Persian speaker would never understand a concept of bon and Persian word formation without knowing both Arabic grammar and Arabic script. To give more details the necessary tool is Arabic script and the sufficient knowledge is the knowledge of Arabic bon. Without knowing the Arabic written form we cannot say that Baten and Batn are from the same base. The Arabic RTL writing system and alphabet does not effect incorporating our language in computers and especially in web.
Take Hebrew for example a perfect instance of right to left script. Another claim that he made in the lecture was that ot would make writing Persian easier. One thing for sure is that having 4 /z/ and 3 /s/ correspondents in our writing system does not make it difficult. In fact its making our language easier! (Although learning Persian writing and spelling is rather hard specially for foreigners and L2 learners, but after getting used to it most learners will understand our vocabulary system) In fact one of the superiorities of Persian language is that, unlike Arabic, it does not need Diacritic (In French: Diacritique) In the end the Persian language will benefit a little (close to none) in changing the writing system and it will ruin our language and our vocabulary vastly.
PS. You can watch the lecture (in Persian) below: