Words • Vocabulary • Spelling •
by Rezwan on 07/14 at 10:32 PM
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Letters • Phonemes • Transliteration •
by Rezwan on 04/04 at 11:46 PM
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Language • Grammar • Academic Language • Basic Communication • Creativity •
by Rezwan on 03/27 at 08:17 AM
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Following fast on the heels of Joel Davis’s Mother Tongue ( LJ 12/93) is another provocative and skillfully written book by an MIT professor who specializes in the language development of children. While Pinker covers some of the same ground as did Davis, he argues that an “innate grammatical machinery of the brain” exists, which allows children to “reinvent” language on their own. Basing his ideas on Noam Chomsky’s Universal Grammar theory, Pinker describes language as a “discrete combinatorial system” that might easily have evolved via natural selection. Pinker steps on a few toes (language mavens beware!), but his work, while controversial, is well argued, challenging, often humorous, and always fascinating. Most public and academic libraries will want to add this title to their collections.
- Laurie Bartolini, Lincoln Lib., Springfield, Ill.

Grammar • Parts of speech • Adverbs •
by Rezwan on 06/14 at 01:19 AM
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Here is a text that highlights one of my favorite Adverbs, “Anyway”.  We have translated it into “به هر حال” in Persian.  Here, then, is the translation of Kent Keith’s “Paradoxical Commandments” in Persian!  Translated with the help of Dr. Razani and Ms. Javadpour.

Here are the commandments in English:

The Paradoxical Commandments
by Kent M. Keith

1. People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
   Love them anyway.


2. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
   Do good anyway.


3. If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies.
   Succeed anyway.


4. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
   Do good anyway.


5. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
   Be honest and frank anyway.


6. The biggest men with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men with the smallest minds.
   Think big anyway.


7. People favor underdogs, but follow only top dogs.
   Fight for a few underdogs anyway.


8. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
   Build anyway.


9. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
   Help people anyway.


10. Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth.
    Give the world the best you have anyway.

Computer Age • Help with this website •
by Rezwan on 12/21 at 04:46 PM
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Those of you who are comfortable typing Persian may be frustrated with the forums because the default theme ("Developer") is set from left to right.  Don’t panic!  All you need to do is switch from the default theme to the Persian right to left theme ("Developer-pe-rtl").  When you change the theme, you change the direction, but all the data remains the same.  And you can easily switch back.  Effectively, you can interface with the forum in two different modes.  Here’s how it works:

Default Forum Theme

At the bottom of each page of the forums, there is a drop down box that says “Developer”.  This is our forum’s default theme. By default, it’s formatted left to right. 

What’s wrong with this?  Nothing.  You can type in both Persian and English.  If you’re mostly typing English you might not notice a problem.  Sentences start on the left and move out to the right.  This is normal for English. 

But if you write a Persian sentence, it will push off from the left, instead of starting at the right.  And the last piece of puntuation doesn’t follow the last word, it jumps to the right side of the sentence.  This might still not be much of a problem. 

The problems occur when you start mixing the two languages.  If you start the sentence in English and throw in a few Persian words مثل اين it looks OK.  But if you type a Persian sentence and throw in English words, it breaks up the order of the sentence, like so (we copied the same sentence twice, in the second one, we pasted in English text over the dashed lines):

جمله بدون كلمه انگليسي ---- اين شكلى در ميايد.

جمله با كلمه انگليس english words اين شكلى در ميايد.

Why does this happen?  The computer just sees a string of text and has a rule of direction.  So, in the first line, it’s all one string of text.  Call it Astring.  But in the second line, you have a string of text Astring, followed by English text, now that’s Bstring, followed by more Persian, that’s Cstring.  Going left to right, the computer puts it down, A,B,C.  You want it to put down C,B,A, but that’s backward to the computer.  While it will happily show the string itself going in the correct direction, it sequences the strings left to right.

Switching to Right to Left

These left to right features will not bother our English dominant writers, but if you want to work mostly in Persian and interject a few words of English it gets frustrating.  We haven’t figured out a way to have bi-lingual post entry but there is a way to simply switch the whole forum to the other direction.  We developed a new theme ("Developer-pe-rtl") which is set to be right to left.  All you have to do is go to the bottom of the page and open the drop down menu and switch it from Developer to Developer-pe-rtl.  It will then switch the entire forum to right to left format.

All the data in the posts remains the same.  You are simply interfacing with the forum from a different direction. 

This means, of course, that if you’re in Developer-pe-rtl mode, the problems the Persian dominant writers were having with their punctuation and with putting in English words will now affect English writing.  Also, what was written in one mode, when looked at in the other mode will appear differently.  But don’t worry, the data’s all there, you’re just seeing it in a different way.  You can switch back and forth and see it both ways. 

Note that while typing in the text, it may appear to be going the wrong way, but when you preview and post it, it should be fine.  I don’t know if this is a function of my own Mac set up or if everyone has this experience.

Going Fully Bi-lingual

Unfortunately, we have yet to figure out how to make it possible to have one forum, and allow people to switch direction modes within a post.  It’s not hard to do in a post on the blog, like right here.  I just put it in an html p or div tag with the “pe” class and hey presto, the sentence starts over to the right:

For some reason, I can’t do this in the forums. Also can’t seem to do it in the comments section. We’re working on a solution.  Please stand by.

More About Computers and Right-To-Left ("rtl")

If you have any links that explain the technicalities of right to left for computers, please let us know and we’ll add them to our sidebar.