If I take up Persian with the goal of reading The Rubaiyat...

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Khayyam
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If I take up Persian with the goal of reading The Rubaiyat...

Postby Khayyam » Mon Jan 03, 2022 6:15 am

Persian speakers who've read Omar Khayyam: if I learn modern Persian, how far will that get me toward being able to read the original version of *The Rubaiyat*? How much has the language changed in the last thousand years? I'm thinking that if a non-English-speaker wanted to be able to read some English work from a thousand years ago, I would tell him to not even bother with modern English and to just learn the old version. Is it the same situation with Persian?
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Re: If I take up Persian with the goal of reading The Rubaiyat...

Postby zenmonkey » Mon Jan 03, 2022 8:40 am

I’ll let more experienced people answer your question but you might be interested by studying also classic grammar with https://archive.org/details/grammarofpersian00jone_0

As suggested by a professor when I asked a similar question.
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Re: If I take up Persian with the goal of reading The Rubaiyat...

Postby Beli Tsar » Mon Jan 03, 2022 4:54 pm

Khayyam wrote:Persian speakers who've read Omar Khayyam: if I learn modern Persian, how far will that get me toward being able to read the original version of *The Rubaiyat*? How much has the language changed in the last thousand years? I'm thinking that if a non-English-speaker wanted to be able to read some English work from a thousand years ago, I would tell him to not even bother with modern English and to just learn the old version. Is it the same situation with Persian?

My Persian is both inadequate to reading the Rubaiyat and pretty rusty, and there are others here who can answer better, but here's my thoughts:

Persian has changed a lot less than English in the same period - this is in no way comparable to reading Old English, which to all intents and purposes is a different language. Classical Persian from the period of the Rubaiyat is basically intelligible to an educated modern Persian, and is considered a subset of 'Modern Persian'. Even I personally find it much easier to understand the Rubaiyat in Persian than I would an equivalent text in Old English, even though I'm a native English speaker who reads texts from 500 years ago for fun and pleasure, but can't actually have a conversation in Persian.

Listening to the first few quatrains of the poem, while much of the vocabulary is unfamiliar to me, the general shape of the lines, the basic grammar and syntax, seem pretty familiar from the Persian I have studied. It feels like if I sat down with a dictionary (perhaps after a day or two of remembering Persian grammar!) I could follow it well enough. Doubtless there are a few awkward bits in there, but it's not like moving to a new grammatical system with Old English.

I'd say the situation is the reverse of English: I'd start with modern Persian even if you want to read medieval poetry, especially as there are many more resources. I guess, though, you would need to read some of the more hardcore textbooks (e.g. Wheeler Thackston's grammar), including the bits of Arabic those deal with, in order to really read old poetry naturally. Poetry is still a huge part of Persian culture. Basic modern Persian courses often include a bit of old poetry - for instance the podcast Chai and Conversation, and I think Persian Language Online (though this is down right now and I can't check).

To my knowledge, good Persian University courses (I'm most familiar with Oxford) don't really differentiate between these periods of Persian - the big change in Persian came with the Arab conquest, and even then there is surprising continuity between that and earlier Persian.

A final note: Persians will love to introduce you to their poetry - lots of them really love it, love to share it, and will recite it to you if you ask. I've had multiple offers of poetry-reading sessions and many times people have shared quotes from Saadi or other poets with me. Persians will just be a bit surprised if you fixate on the Rubaiyat - it's generally held to be good, but not as good as Fitzgerald's translation, whereas poets like Saadi and Hafez are truly brilliant but really hard to translate. Khayyam is considered a third-rank poet in by most Persians!
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Re: If I take up Persian with the goal of reading The Rubaiyat...

Postby half entity » Tue Jan 04, 2022 6:41 pm

Yes, learn modern Persian. Of course you will encounter some old-fashioned words and some words also have a different meaning in the poem than they have today. So it is always good if you can ask a native speaker. But in general, as has already been said, Persian hasn't changed as much as other languages did. If I read for example Walther von der Vogelweide I have the impression of dealing with a completely different languages sometimes.
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Re: If I take up Persian with the goal of reading The Rubaiyat...

Postby David1917 » Fri Jan 07, 2022 5:59 pm

I would learn "Modern Persian" but avoid Abdi Rafee's Colloquial Persian or the FSI course as they are...too colloquial. If you could access Assimil I would suggest that. If your German is up to it, the Langenscheidt book (but I don't recall if it has audio).

There are luckily many more resources for literary Persian, much to the chagrin of the "I just want to order a beer" crowd. My absolute favorite is John Mace - Teach Yourself Persian. The systematic introduction of the alphabet, followed by simple grammatical explanations, good exercises, and eventually reading passages - plus the fact that you can find it in used bookstores for less than $10, make it my go-to recommendation. The only issue is the lack of audio, which a) Persian phonology is rather simple and b) you can get from other sources.

After Mace, you could look at the grammar books by LP Elwell-Sutton, W. St. Clair-Tisdall (available on archive.org), or Wheeler M. Thackston. I think Thackston's might be the best, especially the 4th edition as it includes nastaliq reading practice, and is a bit thicker. Its literary extracts are a bit more modern as well, I think, though there are also some more "classical" ones. The extracts in Elwell-Sutton & St. Clair-Tisdall I think are a little more antiquated, but not quite at Rubaiyat level. After all, Tisdall's was marketed as "Modern Persian Conversation" at the end of the 19th century...

As others have said, the gulf between Persian of the 11th century to that of today is considerably less than the English equivalents. There is a bit of diglossia that some manuals over-stress in my opinion to the detriment of the learner; and natives might exhort you that "nobody talks like that" if you show them the audio you're listening to, but as long as you indicate that you KNOW this and that your PRIORITY is understanding Khayyam, then hopefully you should be good to go.
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