# Persian: ملتم نوع بشر وطنم روی زمین



## Muttaki

Hello,

Except the common words with Turkish I know nothing about the Persian language. While I was searching a Turkish sentence I encountered the Persian sentence in the title. The Turkish sentence is written as the following: "ملتم نوع بشردر، وطنم روی زمین". This can be translated as "My nation is the humankind, my homeland is the earth".

When I searched this at Google I found the following Persian sentence: "ملتم نوع بشر وطنم روی زمین". The only difference from the Turkish one is the "در" suffix of Turkish. What I want to ask is what do the "م" suffixes mean in Persian? In Turkish it means "my", so when "ملت" is "nation" "ملتم" means "my nation", is this exactly the same with Persian?

Thanks.


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## fdb

Yes, the -m suffix means "my" in Persian and in Turkish. But this is pure coincidence.


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## colognial

How is it pure coincidence, fdb?


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## dilandlanguage

Pronunciation is also different,it is  in Turkish like "ım" , in Persian  "am".
And in Persian i think it is an abbreviation. It can be "millet -i men" and "milleti ma"


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## fdb

colognial said:


> How is it pure coincidence, fdb?



The Persian suffix -am is Indo-European (Old Persian -mai, ultimately connected with English "me"). The Turkish suffix is Turkic/Altaic.


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## Stranger_

> The Turkish sentence is written as the following: "ملتم نوع بشردر، *وطنم روی زمین*"


How is *the second part *Turkish? Do you have the word "روی" in Turkish?


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## fdb

From my limited knowledge of Ottoman Turkish I would say that the whole sentence is grammatically correct Turkish, even though every word except در is a loan word from Arabic or Persian.


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## PersoLatin

What does در mean here, in Turkish, and is it possible that it is لر - ler, the plural marker?


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## Stranger_

No no, this "dir" is the same as "است" in Persian.

Milletim nev-i beşer*dir* vatanım ruy-i zemin.

ملتم نوع بشر *است*
وطنم روی زمین


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## PersoLatin

Thank you Stranger_.

Hi Muttaki, do you have access to more of the Turkish version of this writing? I can only find references to its Persian version.


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## Muttaki

Thank you all for replies.

@Stranger_ Yes, روی exists in Turkish though not in everyday speech but in the books. Actually many words, since the adoption of the Latin letters, have disappeared in Turkish, today a highly educated man/woman in Turkey would not understand most of the things when he/she reads a book from the time of say 80 years ago; but that's another debate.

@PersoLatin Hi PersoLatin do you mean this sentence? The only thing I know about it is that it is a quote from a Turkish poet named Tevfik Fikret.


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## colognial

fdb said:


> The Persian suffix -am is Indo-European (Old Persian -mai, ultimately connected with English "me"). The Turkish suffix is Turkic/Altaic.



I see. Thank you, fdb. 



Muttaki said:


> When I searched this at Google I found the following Persian sentence: "ملتم نوع بشر وطنم روی زمین". The only difference from the Turkish one is the "در" suffix of Turkish.



Muttaki, could you please tell us if the phrase still makes sense in Turkish even without the verb در?


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## Muttaki

@colognial Yes, it makes perfect sense. The در suffix is generally tought to the foreigners as the equivalent of the verb "to be" in English or "être" in French. But it is only optional in Turkish. Like in Arabic without it the sentence makes perfect sense. For instance "بو" means "this", "بر" means "a" and "قلم" means "pencil"; so "بو بر قلم" means "this is a pencil". The same goes with that quote.


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## colognial

Thanks, Muttaki. I, too, thought the word در was an independent word meaning 'is'. But you have corrected me on that. But would you agree that the distinction between the Persian and the Turkish ways of looking at the quote remains, in the sense that in Persian the quote is considered a phrase, whereas a native Turkish speaker would see a sentence there, complete with an implied 'to be' verb?


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## Muttaki

Yeah, surely; but I didn't know that it is not a sentence in Persian but a phrase. So you always need the verb to be to form a sentence in Persian?

Can you also translate the quote to English?


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## colognial

Sure. ملتم نوع بشر وطنم روی زمین = My nation: mankind, my homeland: the surface of the earth. [Persian.]


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## PersoLatin

The more I read this, the less I understand the message it is conveying. Is the author saying, the whole human race is his 'nation' and that his 'homeland' is somewhere on earth, no where specific, maybe the whole earth? I don't know about the context in which this was written, but this would make some sense if the author's thinking was the same as Ghandi or Martin Luther King's, although even with those guys, the priority was their own people rather than the whole human race.


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## colognial

PersoLatin said:


> The more I read this, the less I understand the message it is conveying. Is the author saying, the whole human race is his 'nation' and that his 'homeland' is somewhere on earth, no where specific, maybe the whole earth? I don't know about the context in which this was written, but this would make some sense if the author's thinking was the same as Ghandi or Martin Luther King's, although even with those guys, the priority was their own people rather than the whole human race.



The speaker is a cosmopolitan type, or wishes to think of him/herself in that way: somebody who knows about the world, has been to a lot of places, and understands different cultures. 

But there is more to it than that. The phrase, to me, suggests a humanism and an advocacy of humanitarian ideals, a being in harmony with the earth and its inhabitants. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King certainly focused on specific issues, but they are good examples of people widely respected, individuals with wisdom and charisma, which is how they managed to get their message across and influence many outside their respective countries.


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## Dib

colognial said:


> I, too, thought the word در was an independent word meaning 'is'.



Just to add an etymological tidbit, this "suffix" is indeed a fossilized form of the verb "durmak".


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## Muttaki

Dib said:


> Just to add an etymological tidbit, this "suffix" is indeed a fossilized form of the verb "durmak".



Do you know the reasoning behind this idea?


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## Dib

Muttaki said:


> Dib said:
> 
> 
> 
> Just to add an etymological tidbit, this "suffix" is indeed a fossilized form of the verb "durmak".
> 
> 
> 
> Do you know the reasoning behind this idea?
Click to expand...


To be frank, no, I am not personally acquainted with the evidence, this idea is based on. My source of information is this:
"The third person form -DUrUr had developed in Oghuz from the aorist of _tur-_ 'to stand'. The shortened form -DUr was already standard in Anatolia by the fourteenth century, with -DUrUr lingering on in Ottoman as a mainly poetic variant." - p. 192 "The Turkic Languages", edited by Csató & Johansson (1998).

Note:
1) D = t/d
2) U = u/ü (but not ı/i; originally ı/i did not alternate with u/ü)
3) tur- is the older form of modern dur-
4) They call aorist the tense conjugated in Modern Turkish as "dururum, durursun, durur, etc."


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