Taʿârof, the ceremony of courtesy | Hacker News Reader

Taʿârof, the ceremony of courtesy

riowang.blogspot.com

60 pointsevilsimon23 comments

Funny, "na merci" is basically the same as "non merci" in French - since the words are so similar I wonder if that expression does not come from French somehow.

Other than that, the whole process is not unique to Persians. Maybe they are extreme about it, but in Japan you can see pretty much the same kind of situations as the ones they described... while I must admit the taxi driver telling you the trip was "nothing at all" is rather amusing and unique.

I've been trying to learn Farsi lately and keep getting struck by the large number of French loanwords. Including at least one that goes back to time of the Crusades - my wife's Iranian and she always calls me a "Firangi," which basically just mean "Westerner" now, but is a transliteration of "Frank." Apparently it also ended up becoming the name for an Indianized variant on the medieval European broadsword:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firangi_(sword)

Oh wow, thats crazy interesting... There's a beach area on Penang in Malaysia called Batu Ferringhi. It means Foreigner's Rock.

I guess the loan word spread throughout the muslim world somehow...

Amazingly, it even made its way into Chinese as folangji (佛郎機):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farang#Etymology_and_related_w...

Sort of reminds me of an anecdote I read somewhere in a book about medieval fashion - one theory is that those curvy-toed shoes you see in late medieval artwork originated in Tang dynasty China, and the fashion took ~500 years to slowly make its way west across Eurasia.

Now you have me wondering if it could possibly be the inspiration for the name of the Ferengi.

Your link also mentions the word is used in Thai as Farang as well.

It's also in Hindi as Firangi as well.

Wow, really cool! Words are without borders.

Information wants to be free.

It is actually much simplier than that. The word you're speaking of is "Farangi" which is Farsi for foreigner.

Farsi is an indo-european language so beside loan words which infiltrated the language during Reza Shah's moderinization of Iran, many of them actually share the same root as other Indo-European languages like English, French or German.

Farangi is one of those words. It is not a borrowed word

Farsi has plenty of cognates with English too. My favorite is "Behtar" which means better. The nice twist is that "Beh" means good, so "Behtar" literally means "gooder". English, or some earlier language that became English, probably had a word like "beh" which meant good. But we lost that word, but kept better. Farsi still has both words.

Surprisingly, some essential or very common English words came from Persian including: Check, Magic, Rank, Path, Orange, Peach, Lemon, Candy, Sugar, Caravan, Bronze, Chess, Jackal, Kiosk, Mummy, Paradise...

'Pirang' in Bahasa Indonesia describes physical trait of Europeans i.e. hair colour.

Mersi is a loanword from French[1], it's also used in the adjacent country of Armenia.

The Proto-Indo-European root for "no" is *ne, so many (most?) IE languages feature this. e.g. no, non, nyet, nein, ne, na, ni, etc. There are languages from India to Ireland that have this sort of negation. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_loanwords_in_Pe...

[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Indo-European/...

By the way, I can understand the use of loanwords for modern things that you did not have in your language, but why use a loanword for something as simple as "thank you" ? Didn't Farsi have a specific word for showing gratitude in its language in the first place? Why is it not used instead?

The list in [1] is huge! So many loanwords.

Reza Shah ruled Iran from 1925 - 1941 during which he worked hard to modernize the country. One of the ways he accomplished this was to import as much as he could from Europe. This is the reason beheind the French influence on the language. For any item that Farsi didn't have a word for or the word was too long or difficult, the French version became the defacto.

Hence Tie is "Kerevaat" (fr. cravate), Elevator is "Asaansor" (fr. ascenseur) and Pineapple is "Anaanaas" (fr. ananas)

Thank you for this! I have always thought that Farsi sounded like French for some reason, and I could never put my finger on what it was. This clears things up!

Since I learned farsi and live with my Iranian wife, I actually can't speak french fluently any more. After 3 days in France, the reverse thing happens and I talk to my wife in French, which she does not understand. Somehow, French and Persian occupy the same area of my brain. I also find that native French/Farsi speakers have a similar (not equal) accent when talking German. I always say " when someone calls and has a French accent, but the name sounds Middle Eastern, he's Iranian"

I had something similar - I learnt a bunch of spanish when I was in high school, then moved to india and learnt a bunch of hindi. And when I tried speaking spanish again after learning all that hindi, I found I couldn't articulate in spanish, only in hindi. I would think of something in spanish, and then out of my mouth would come hindi. It was funny and puzzling at the same time

I don't believe Tārof is specific to Iranians. I've seen it among Asians and some Indian coworkers.

It's not a good behavior. It's dishonest and confusing.

Beautiful and interesting. And the comments section is an object study in why you have to be very careful about which comments services you use on a blog, if indeed you decide to use one at all.

I'm still not sure why people still do it, though if I had to pick one I've liked using G+.

That first paragraph, some beautiful writing there.

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