Dear dialists,
And just by sake of curiosity: does anybody have the original
arabic quotation written in kufic symbols? (I know that Omar Khayyam
was Iranian but, to my knowledge he used to write in arabic, didn't he?)
No, he wrote in Persian.
Persian, Perse, Pharasee, Farsee, Farsi... are all variants of the same
word. "Iran", which is related to "Aryan" was adopted as the name of the
country starting in 1936 to replace "Persia" for reasons too complicated to
to into, partly as a result as an attempt to curry favor with Nazi Germany
but also due to reasons of internal ethnic inclusiveness.
Persian/Farsi is written using the Arabic alphabet, but the Persian
(Farisi) language is completely unrelated to Arabic. Actually, it's an
Indo- European language, and as such is a distant cousin of our more
familiar romance and germanic groups. Arabic is a Semitic language and
has a completely different structure from Farsi. So if you can't
understand Arabic or Persian and see a written sample, they look pretty
much the same, just as English and Finnish might look the same to a Chinese
reader looking at printed material.
Kufic is a type of stylized arabic writing that was in vogue during the 8th
through the 10th century. It uses an angular, non-slanted block style
particularly suitable for inscriptions in stone, as opposed to the
traditional flowing cursive arabic script normally written with a pen
. Saying "...written in Kufic symbols" is like saying "...written in
helvetica sans serif type"
So what you want is the original Persian quotation written in Arabic script
or Arabic letters.
Jack
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