Behdad Esfahbod <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Also about the attachment we saw, note that Naskh, Nasta'liq,
>Koofi, etc are all different calligraphic styles of the same
>Arabic script. So even the attachment saying "khatt-e naskh ...
>khatt-e faarsi naam gerefti" is completely non-sense here.
You probably mixed the notion of the alphabet and the orthography system. The Arabic alphabet can be adopted by the other languages and even dialects. When other dialects adopt the alphabet and its general rules (connections & RTL), they can adapt those rules in order to fit to their own language needs. This rule adaptation on alphabet is called "khaat". In Persian for instance, we are not able to pronounce all 4 forms of /ze/ (ze, zA, zAd, zAl). We pronounce /zAlem/ with /ze/ not with /zAd/. That's why kids in elementary schools make a lot of mistakes (in our obligatory dictation) in writing words like /tuti/ with /te/ instead of /tA/.
As you are aware, Persian language, which is an analytical language, is completely different from the inflectional Arabic language. In Persian you can make a word by adding some affixes which is not possible in Arabic. e.g. the Persian word /nA-tar-AvA-yi/ is equal to the Arabic phrase "lA emkAna qAbeliyata tarashoh/. The Iranians adopted the Arabic alphabet+ its general rules and adapted this rules to their totally different language; however, this became possible only because the origin of Arabic alphabet and the middle Persian alphabet came from the same “ArAmi” system.
Even when we borrowed nearly 100,000 words from Arabic after the Tazi invasions, we adapted those Arabic words to fulfill our own language needs. E.g. the word “jAme’e” meaning “university” in Arabic has changed its pronunciation and meaning to “society” in Persian. If you still call this borrowed words Arabic, you are probably wrong because you didn't consider the live essence of language. Language is a live mechanism because it lives and grows with human mind so is the script or writing systems (for more info refer to Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind, 1968).
Conclusion: You can say that the origin of our alphabet is Arabic but you can not claim that our writing system is Arabic. Our writing system is Persian “khaat e farsi”. It is what my teacher Dr. Safavi as a linguist says in his book and what I also say as a linguist.
Just let me know if more linguists are needed to testify :) however, what linguists believed and struggled to say has been ignored extensively during past years. Dr Bateni proposed a minor change to our writing system long ago in order to better serve the Persian language; and they ignored him and fired him from the
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