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I sent the following letter to Microsoft
today.
I hope they will listen to the truth and
standard.
The letter:
To whom it may concern,
I want to talk about the wrong localization used
for Persian (Native name: Farsi) [compare the usage with German (Native:
Deutsch)].
When localizing Persian-speaking regions/countries,
you should use the following:
Persian (Iran)/ Persian (Afghanistan) / Persian (Tajikistan) ... like English (United States) / English (United Kingdom) / etc. The code used for showing slight differences (like
for US or UK) should have a format like this:
fa-ir / fa-af / fa-tj / (in which "fa" stands for FARSI, the native name of all these dialects of Persian); just like en-us / en-uk / etc. The language name abbreviation also should be corrected to PEI, PEA, and PET respectively. For your "language collections", you have used
Arabic (with 13 languages); but the sole authority for ISO in languages and
scripts ( http://www.unicode.org/iuc/iuc18/a356.html
), as well as INFOTERM ( http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/englangn.html
and http://lcweb.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/langhome.html
), has updated and corrected the name of this writing system from Arabic to
"Perso-Arabic" (you can search for it) to include Persian, Urdu, Pashto, ... ,
too.
The biggest mistake has been made when you used
"farsi" in your language lists; however, "farsi"is not the English name of this
language and in English it is called "Persian". It is just like using Deutsch in
your list instead of German! Do you do that?? You may wish to check ISO here: http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/englangn.html
The Iranian Academy of Persian Language and Literature (exactly with this name in English)(www.PersianAcademy.ir) has banned the usage of Farsi instead of Persian in English texts (as well as for other languages: Persisch, Persa, Persitski, sParsuli, Parsi, Persan, ...) in an official announcement to all foreign embassies and I have quoted the English translation of whole the resolution at the end of this mail. For further info, you may wish to visit the
following sites (highly recommended: *** ):
*** http://www.PersianDirect.com (go to its MessageBoard for articles written by some other scholars) http://www.PersianAcademy.ir *** http://www.IranianLanguages.com http://www.Persian-Language.org http://www.PersianTools.com *** http://www.voanews.com/persian (VOA Persian) *** http://www.bbcpersian.com (BBC Persian Service) *** http://www2.dw-world.de/persian (Deutsche Welle Persian Service) *** http://www.kkhec.ac.ir/on_the_persian_language.htm http://www.4reference.net/encyclopedias/wikipedia/Persian_language.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_language *** http://persian.usinfo.state.gov/ *** http://usembassy.state.gov/tokyo/wwwh20030513a7.html http://www.rferl.org/bd/ir/ (Radio Free Europe) *** P.S.--- The Announcement of the Persian Academy
(IAPLL):
The Language of the nation of Iran [Persia] in English is called "Persian" [or in other European languages: Persane, Persisch, Persa, Persiska, etc.] and is known worldwide as PERSIAN. Recently some Iranians [Persians] have been trying to use "Farsi" instead of Persian, the trend which has also been followed by some non-Iranians. This has occurred to the extent that it has raised the question "Which is the correct word, in English, for the language of Iran's people, Persian or Farsi?!..." This question was put to the official institution FARHANGESTAN (Persian Language and Literature Academy in Tehran) by the Commerce Department for Australia, at Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In their 34th meeting on 7th of December 1992, the Persian Academy unanimously passed the resolution that this language must be called PERSIAN and the reasons given were: 1- PERSIAN has been used in a variety of publications including cultural, scientific and diplomatic documents for centuries and, therefore, it connotes a very significant historical and cultural meaning. Hence, changing PERSIAN to FARSI is to negate this established important precedence. 2- Changing PERSIAN to FARSI may give the impression that it is a new language, and this may well be the intention of some Farsi users. 3- It may also give the impression that FARSI is a dialect of some parts of Iran and not the predominant (official) language of this country. 4- Fortunately, FARSI has never been used in any research paper or university document in any Western language and the proposal of its usage will create doubt and ambiguity about the name of the official language of our country. |
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