# Persian: telefonan



## saalik

What does تلفنا telefonan mean? It seems like an Arabic word but it isn’t in my Arabic dictionaries.


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## PersoLatin

I'm sure it means 'by phone', I have never heard it used in Persian before, it uses the Arabic rule for making an adverb from a noun,  here, the telephone.


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## curious boy

Are you sure it's not 
*تَلْفَنَّا* ‎(talfannā) first-person plural past active of _تَلْفَنَ_ ‎(talfana) (_ تَلْفَنَ means to telephone-It's an Arabic word)_
or
*تُلْفِنَّا* ‎(tulfinnā) first-person plural past passive of _تَلْفَنَ_ ‎(talfana)


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## Treaty

People used to use this type of structure before but you can't hear it nowadays thanks to a campaign by the Persian Academy (in 1990s). There has even been تلگرافاً. There were also Persian words added by tanwin (e.g., خواهشاَ) which are also not much acceptable but you may still hear them on the street.


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## BillieJean

Interesting! What was the Persian Academy's campaign about?


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## Treaty

That particular outreach was called فارسی را پاس بداریم (Let's guard/preserve Persian), mainly aiming to raise awareness about morphologically and grammatically 'incorrect' structures (like using out-of-place prepositions, combining Arabic suffixes with Persian words, etc.).


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## Sheikh_14

Politics aside such outreach isn't a terrible thing so long as it links up and adds to the indigenous trends and extrapolations of a language. If the Arabic adverb form was merely an alternative and not a replacement than no harm was being done to the integrity of the Persian language. The supposed over-purification of any language seeks to eradict historical influences as a machismo means to project superiority and purity which in this day and age is next to impossible and a pipe-dream. The Parsi/Farsi debate was another one where we came across this tendency. Does Persian completely eschew using the Arabic "an" adverb or does it use it with other constructs (I suppose it does use it but only with Arabic derived terms)? In urdu we use it quite liberally and without any qualms but also predominantly for Arabic derived terms.


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## mehboob

Treaty said:


> That particular outreach was called فارسی را پاس بداریم (Let's guard/preserve Persian), mainly aiming to raise awareness about morphologically and grammatically 'incorrect' structures (like using out-of-place prepositions, combining Arabic suffixes with Persian words, etc.).



Shouldn't the imperative from پاس داشتن be پاس دار! پاس دارید! پاس داریم!
I mean it shouldn't have be- in it since it is a compound verb.


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## colognial

Sheikh_14 said:


> Politics aside such outreach isn't a terrible thing so long as it links up and adds to the indigenous trends and extrapolations of a language. If the Arabic adverb form was merely an alternative and not a replacement than no harm was being done to the integrity of the Persian language. The supposed over-purification of any language seeks to eradict historical influences as a machismo means to project superiority and purity which in this day and age is next to impossible and a pipe-dream. The Parsi/Farsi debate was another one where we came across this tendency. Does Persian completely eschew using the Arabic "an" adverb or does it use it with other constructs (I suppose it does use it but only with Arabic derived terms)? In urdu we use it quite liberally and without any qualms but also predominantly for Arabic derived terms.



My personal view is, the tanvin is a useful tool for turning an adjective into an adverb. The point is, it is too handy a tool perhaps, being overused in a lazy way and extended to instances where an alternative does exist. It's not so much a question of integrity of Persian or politics as a warning that the end result of 'tanvinning' is not always so pretty. Imagine someone subjecting the word 'bishtar' (بیش تر, more) to 'tanvination' to make up the adverb بیش تراً! It's been known to happen! Well, fine, I say, except that in Persian the word بیش تر can be used as an adverb just as it is. If simplicity is the order of the day in language development, then I would advocate more restraint in the use of the tanvin. But you cannot officiate over how people talk, so let them have the tanvin if they must, I say. Personally I would never put it at the end of a Persian-origin word. 

Incidentally, Dariush Aashouri, the Iranian writer, has written about the use of tanvin. You could google him up, though his article has not been translated into English so far as I'm aware, so I don't know how useful it may be to a non-native speaker.


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## Treaty

mehboob said:


> Shouldn't the imperative from پاس داشتن be پاس دار! پاس دارید! پاس داریم!
> I mean it shouldn't have be- in it since it is a compound verb.


This rule is for when the verb is made by a prefix and another verb (e.g., دریافتن or برداشتن) not when it is made of a noun/adjective and a verb.
By the way, I'm not sure it is imperative (it may be hortative).


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## Treaty

colognial said:


> Incidentally, Dariush Aashouri, the Iranian writer, has written about the use of tanvin.


The problem with him and many others is that they consider the evil and ugliness of mixing Arabic and Persian morphemes as granted. Then of course it is easy to write about it.


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## colognial

Treaty said:


> The problem with him and many others is that they consider the evil and ugliness of mixing Arabic and Persian morphemes as granted. Then of course it is easy to write about it.



And yet, even Ashouri admits there are not synonyms in Persian to replace _all_ the tanvin-daar words with. Mixing Persian and Arabic has been our daily bread and butter for centuries, and Ashouri of all people knows better than to condemn the practice outright for puritanical reasons. He suggests the alternatives (where there are good ones available from Persian), I guess, firstly because he would prefer it if we subjected Arabic words to the Persian rules of grammar and not vice versa, and secondly, because the alternatives, too, deserve a chance to get into the public sphere and be tried out.


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## PersoLatin

Politics, over-purification, mascismo? Really? It's one thing to borrow vocabulary from another language but grammatical rules too? And when there's no need to? No thank you!

Why not use the English 'ly', the French 'ment' as well as the Arabic 'tanvin'? Would doing so be seen by non-Persians with some interest in Persian, as pollution of Persian? Most probably not, but the opposite is seen as over-purification/mascismo.

So no thank you to 'tanvin', 'ly' or 'ment', with Persian words.


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## Treaty

PersoLatin said:


> It's one thing to borrow vocabulary from another language but grammatical rules too? And when there's no need to?


Borrowing a word or rule is simply an event. It doesn't have a positive or negative value per se. Of course, necessity is debatable. However, people like Ashouri valuate language dynamics so easily and quickly by using suggestive words like "pollution" or "ugly". If we consider this prejudgment as granted, there won't be any space left for further discussion.


PersoLatin said:


> Would doing so be seen by non-Persians with some interest in Persian, as pollution of Persian?Most probably not, but the opposite is seen as over-purification/mascismo.


If White people marry Blacks, we don't call it "pollution". However, if they start divorcing them or stop marrying them simply because they are not White, we call it "racism". Language is the same.


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## colognial

Nice metaphor, Treaty! If an English speaker were to say: I shall smile indulgently, you would understand them. If they chose to say: I shall smile indulgentement, you would understand that they had used a French ending, and you would most likely smile indulgently at the quaint hybrid. You just have to decide what effect you want to create when you choose an alternative. In Persian even today, I mean even after so many centuries, it seems to some of us, when we come upon a union of Persian word+tanveen, that it's been done either out of laziness, i.e. through force of habit, or for effect. It's always good to have a choice.


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## marrish

Sorry to chime in, just for information, in Urdu we use only one Persian word with tanvin اندازاً and there is نمونتاً as well which I read once, but there are no other constructions like this in that language.


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## Treaty

What does اندازاَ mean? Does it mean like "regarding the size"?


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## marrish

Treaty said:


> What does اندازاَ mean? Does it mean like "regarding the size"?


It means "by rough estimation (as for the size, but also abstract), by conjecture, approximately", similar to تخمیناً .


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## saalik

Thanks for all the useful replies. Did people stop using احتیاج داشتن and replace it with نیاز داشتن because of encouragement from the Persian Academy too?
Similarly, کلمہ became واژہ
جواب became پاسخ
سعی became تلاش
اینطور became اینجور
چقدر became چہ اندازہ
and so on.
And it all occurred over the past two decades or so. Is it all because of the Persian Academy?


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## curious boy

saalik said:


> Did people stop using احتیاج داشتن and replace it with نیاز داشتن because of encouragement from the Persian Academy too?
> Similarly, کلمہ became واژہ
> جواب became پاسخ
> سعی became تلاش
> اینطور became اینجور
> چقدر became چہ اندازہ
> and so on.
> And it all occurred over the past two decades or so. Is it all because of the Persian Academy?


I should say yes, but you should know that people haven't stopped using those words and still many people use them.


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## colognial

I agree with curious boy. Words are not just discarded; each one has its own tradition, unique meaning and special place in the language. Yet some do die out for reasons that cannot be easily pinpointed. This has always been the way of all languages.


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## PersoLatin

marrish said:


> Sorry to chime in, just for information, in Urdu we use only one Persian word with tanvin اندازاً and there is نمونتاً as well which I read once, but there are no other constructions like this in that language.


Very good to hear this (only two) , please keep that up.



marrish said:


> نمونتاً


BTW- where did 't' come from in نمونتاً? Very likely, someone assumed نمونه was Arabic and therefore نمونة.


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