I don’t know why I posted about this on Facebook instead of here; I guess I happened to be there when the question occurred to me. At any rate, the word is so interesting and the solution so satisfying I’m going to repost it here:
I’m reading the Calvin Tomkins piece on Tala Madani in last week’s New Yorker, and I just got to this:
“Fortunately, I loved school, and reading was a big part of my life, especially history and Runi mythology,” she told me.
I’ve read a fair amount about Iranian history and culture, and I’ve never heard of “Runi mythology”; furthermore, there’s no “runi” in either of my Farsi dictionaries. Is this a lapse on the part of the famed NYkr fact-checking department? Should it be “Rumi” (but what might “Rumi mythology” be)? Or is it some obscure thing that Madani and the NYkr fact-checkers know about but I don’t? Any enlightenment is welcome.
UPDATE: It turns out that, as Lameen Souag suggested and Patrick Taylor confirmed, it’s the word “Irɑni” (‘Iranian’) with the colloquial shift ɑ > u before nasals, so it means “Iranian mythology.” I’m glad it’s not a mistake, but I wonder if the fact-checkers investigated — you’d think the magazine would have added an explanation…
Another interesting linguistic tidbit occurs later in the article: “a tasty Iranian soup called Ash-e-anar.” Setting aside the pointless capital A (would they write “a tasty Italian dish called Pizza”?), we have two common words, آش âš ‘(thick) soup’ and انار anâr ‘pomegranate,’ joined by the ezafe, which is omnipresent in speech but (to the annoyance of learners) not indicated in writing. Both nouns are of obscure etymology; for the former, Wiktionary says:
Perhaps from a Turkic language, see Common Turkic *aš. […] however there seems to be an unexplained mismatch in vowel length. Compare Azerbaijani aş, Bashkir аш (aş), Yakut ас (as).
Alternatively, inherited from Middle Persian (/āš/), a hapax legomenon found in the Vendidad, although this word is claimed to be misread.
Connections with Sanskrit आश (āśa, “food”) are also sometimes proposed, but the correspondance would not be regular.
And anâr is “Probably ultimately related to the pomegranate terms under Arabic رُمَّان (rummān)” (itself “Uncertain direct and ultimate source, not Semitic,” with an impressive list of ancient comparanda). At any rate, the soup looks delicious.
The “colloquial shift ɑ > u before nasals” was Tehran dialect when I lived there in the 1970s.
Yes, it’s specifically Tehrani, though I expect it’s spread to circles that want to imitate the capital.
Is anâr really a “monosyllable”?
Whoops, good catch — I’ve changed it to “words.” I think I had just been looking at the alternate form نار (nâr) in the Wiktionary article, and it fuddled my mind.
Maybe length is beside the point, and what was borrowed is the vowel quality, [ɑ] as opposed to [æ]?
Vowel length seems to be entirely absent from the videos from the ongoing revolution. (Also, [ɑ] has moved on to at least [ɒ].)
My understanding is that Tehrani Farsi, like American English, has replaced vowel length with vowel height as a phonemic feature.
Something of this sort is strangely common also in various other new Iranic languages, some of them quite far off and only distantly related, such as *ā > o in Ossetic, *ā > ɔ̄ in Parachi, *ō > ū in Yaghnobi.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narsharab – an easily etymologisable sause.
People here sometimes discuss interference of L2 in L10… I just experienced a cute episode of Irish in Arabic (remarcable, because I don’t really know Irish and attended a Modern Irish course a millenium ago anyway).
Nice! What kind of interference was it?
Well, they’re both VSO …
Unlike in AmEng, it’s gone as a phonetic feature as well. (I’m thinking of marg bar diktator in particular, i being historically long and the others short.)
And elsewhere: *-am(C) > *-um(C) is an innovation of Northwest Germanic, and happened somewhere in (Balto?-)Slavic as well (I forgot all the details). Though it’s hard to tell if the nasality or the labiality is to blame for the rounding here; *-an(C) endings with an actual consonantal [n] or, IIRC, [ŋ] weren’t available in Germanic at least.
the word “Irɑni”
I’m confused by the letter ɑ there; is this IPA? If so, shouldn’t the word start with i, not I? If it’s a transliteration, I’d use Wiktionary’s system (irâni) for consistency with the other words.
I liked it, because after all ɑ is a. And I read it as “Irani” with specified phonetic value of ɑ.
@LH, nothing terribly unusual. I was trying to remember something very basic. Immediately my brain suggested what I should say, but… all grammatical markers and phonology looked weirdly un-Arabic.
When I thought “well, maybe it is not Arabic?” I immediately realised it is Irish.
Maybe what played a role is that I actually attended a course (even two), with teachers, textbooks, everything.
I had a Farsi textbook once whose transcriptions distinguished a and ɑ. It drove me crazy.
In Toçikiston (lotinī orthography) they use o, nasals or not…
In Oʻzbekiston (lotincha) too…
Also I know Uzbekiston (this time transliteration from Cyrillic) as a name of Uzbek konyak.
I had a Farsi textbook once whose transcriptions distinguished a and ɑ
Lambton’s Persian Grammar does that.
Lambton! Right. Why couldn’t he have used æ for the first one?
The pronunciation of that one seems to vary much more ([a~æ]) than that of the other ([ɒ], perhaps [ɔ]).
“…. آش âš ‘(thick) soup’ and انار anâr ‘pomegranate,’ joined by the ezafe, which is omnipresent in speech but (to the annoyance of learners) not indicated in writing. Both nouns are of obscure etymology…”
As I am now advertising Encyclopedia Iranica, I note that it has Āš.
I am sure there are books about it, but I support the idea that scholars should write about food as such. I think I told that if I ever will found an university, it will have a kathedra of edible etymologies (which will cook for students).
I support the idea that scholars should write about food as such.
I second the motion. I love Culinary Cultures of the Middle East (edited by Sami Zubaida) and wish there were more books like it.
And anâr is “Probably ultimately related to the pomegranate terms under Arabic رُمَّان (rummān)” (itself “Uncertain direct and ultimate source, not Semitic,” with an impressive list of ancient comparanda).
Huh, the OED seems to speculate that it might come from the same source as “orange”, whose route into Italian and the rest of Europe was
Are they actually suggesting that anār developed from nārang? That would seem to contradict the known history, if I understand correctly: pomegranates have a very long history in the Middle East, while citrus fruits originated from Southeast Asia, spreading via India to the Islamic world not until medieval times, first the bitter orange then the sweet orange, then to Europe. Or maybe they’re hinting that anār could be an eggcornish influence of nārang on some previous word? But if anār is documented far enough back in Middle Persian, it might even predate the arrival of oranges in Persia. Anyone know more?
(I wish dictionaries would quit using the vague catchall “compare”. It seems only good for the obsolete reason of minimizing space. Sometimes it means “parallel borrowings from the same source into other languages include …”, sometimes it means “a similar semantic development has occurred in …”, sometimes something else — say what you mean! Can’t remember if somebody else had a similar complaint here recently.)
I’m mostly fine with this “compare”, because what if the author is not sure how exactly this form is related?
(I also support the idea that scholars should say “I don’t know” when they don’t know. The school picture of science – “a corpus of knowlege” rather than “a process of asking questions” – is false and… uninteresting)
Of course they should say “this similar word exists and we don’t know if it is related or just a coincidence” — *in those words*, not using “compare” as a secret code. My objection was, as I said, to “compare” as a vague catchall, using the same word for any degree of certainty from 0 up to 100%. They use it for 100%, e.g., in listing Romance descendants from the Latin source for any English word borrowed from Latin.
The other objection to tossing Persian anār into the orange etymology as a “maybe; who knows?” is that we *do* know that pomegranates were established in Persia long before oranges, and it seems misleading to bring in the word without that context.