Three scripts, one language
Persian in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, and the possibility of a shared space of knowledge
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
A student in Dushanbe who loves Hafez often cannot read the Divan in an edition printed in Kabul or Tehran. Tajik has been written in Cyrillic since 1940, after a short period in the Latin alphabet and centuries in the same script used in Iran and Afghanistan today. The formal written language of the three countries is still so close that a scholarly text, with small differences in vocabulary, can be understood in all three. What separates these readers is the script, not the language.
The result of this separation is three book markets, three traditions of coining terms and three archives that rarely visit one another. A book on the history of science translated in Tehran is translated again in Dushanbe, this time from Russian. A Tajik researcher who wants to read the work of an Afghan colleague must either learn the Perso-Arabic script or wait for the text to reach English. A language spoken by tens of millions of people has been split, in the digital space, into three smaller islands.
Automatic transliteration between Tajik Cyrillic and the Perso-Arabic script exists, but it is mostly treated as a side tool. My proposal is to place it at the heart of the knowledge infrastructure. Transliteration is not translation; it is the same text in another form. If each work has one identifier and its script versions are displays of that identifier, a shared library becomes possible in which readers choose their own script. What remains are the real differences in vocabulary, and these should be annotated, not erased.
This work is political as well. Each of the three states has its own account of the "national language": Farsi, Dari, Tajik. I am not arguing for merging the names; I am arguing that knowledge should not stop at the border of a script. The shared space of Persian knowledge will not be built by governments. It will be built by librarians, independent publishers and researchers who decide to publish their work so that it can be read in all three scripts.
Questions for discussion
- What is lost in transliteration between Tajik Cyrillic and the Perso-Arabic script, and how can that loss be kept visible?
- Is a shared library for Persian speakers of the three countries possible without the agreement of their governments?
- How should real differences in scholarly vocabulary be recorded so that no forced standardisation takes place?
References
Perry, John R. 2005. A Tajik Persian Reference Grammar. Leiden: Brill.
Spooner, Brian, and William L. Hanaway, eds. 2012. Literacy in the Persianate World: Writing and the Social Order. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Green, Nile, ed. 2019. The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca. Oakland: University of California Press.