Monday 21 August 2017

The Persian Language

I was in a shop today where two women were taking dressmaking measurements of a young girl's body and the one with the tape measure was calling the numbers to the woman who was writing them down. I was fascinated by the lovely sound of the words and tried to figure out what language group their speech might belong to. I couldn't hear anything that sounded like any numbers I know.

Of course, I had to ask. It was Farsi. On this site I've just linked to, I read
Farsi, also known as Persian Language, is the most widely spoken member of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, a subfamily of the Indo-European Languages. 

What an interesting place my city is, where I can hear such a variety of languages!

One of the women obliged me by counting to ten in Farsi, which I thought was very kind of her. Here's a link to a list of those numbers.