I've settled on Persian for my non-English language for the vocabulary acquisition class. It's a language I'm fascinated by for a host of reasons. It's Indo-European and has a very long history—and I'm a sucker for history like that. And while modern Persian isn't its ancient counterpart, I'm also fascinated with the interplay between Iran and the West, which has been going on for years. And I'd like to go there, because it looks way cool. Alas, money is the biggest obstacle. Though the state based in Washington doesn't think it should be easy for me to go there either (and I'm not entirely sure that the state based in Tehran feels much differently).
So I'll get a little vicarious. As usual, I'll be blogging my way through this mess. In order to keep things from getting off track here, I'm setting up a blog here. To help anchor the words in the culture of Iran, I'm going to pick out proverbs. For one, you can't separate a language from its culture. For another, one of the aspects of a language that has been hinted at in class is set blocks of speech. And I really hope to be able to tell you more about formulaic speech in upcoming entries.
So I'll get a little vicarious. As usual, I'll be blogging my way through this mess. In order to keep things from getting off track here, I'm setting up a blog here. To help anchor the words in the culture of Iran, I'm going to pick out proverbs. For one, you can't separate a language from its culture. For another, one of the aspects of a language that has been hinted at in class is set blocks of speech. And I really hope to be able to tell you more about formulaic speech in upcoming entries.
