Tear Drops and Roses: Persian Punctuation
Except for last week’s Valentine’s Day special, I’ve been a bit quiet here for a few weeks. Over Christmas and New Year, I was away – in Iran, no less – and then worked on a long long (very long) rumination on that journey. It started out as a brief entry for my author website, then took on its own life, as these things tend to do, and ended up taking possession of me for days. It’s grown into quite the beast, unwieldy and perhaps even unreadable because half the size of a short book. In the unlikely case anyone is interested in dipping into this travelogue, click here at your own peril. It's my observation of the state-of-affairs in Iran right now from my particular vantage point as a mixed-race person – with unpopular and fringe views on plenty of things. In any case, this deep-dive into Iran had me dig a bit into Persian punctuation. Which is a thankfully short(er) topic – perfect to counterbalance the long journey journal!
A caveat: I am using Persian and Iranian interchangeably. Persian punctuation has a pleasantly alliterative ring, and I’m a sucker for sound. Many Persians/Iranians will have an opinion about the terms, many will not. There is no one official interpretation: I know Persians who prefer Persian, because (for them) this name refers to the great glorious pre-Islamic past. I know Iranians who (like me) prefer Iranian, because (for us) this term refers to the great glorious pre-colonial past. Iran has never been officially colonized like, say, Algeria or India, but foreign forces like the UK and Russia have grabbed land and taken natural resources at their will nonetheless. To me, Persia and Persian sounds exoticising, and not in a good way (if there is a good way at all): it sounds like some kind of dreamy longing for lush gardens, heady poetry, and perfumed hedonistic orgies with sexually available dark beauties. Fitzgerald’s fin de siècle translations of the great poet Omar Khayyam, basically.
I also believe one can make a case for “Persian” referring to one ethnic group at the expense of the many other ethnicities living within Iran today, amongst whom Turkish-Iranians in the north-east, Kurds in the east, Arab-Iranians in the south, Baloochis in the south-east next to Pakistan, and several others. To me, Iranian refers to the territory of the country today which sometimes expanded and seldom shrunk; where numerous ethnic peoples passed through, lived, and still live, contributing to the culture at large in their own way; where religions mix and mingle, the big three, and also nature-based beliefs like Zoroastrianism. To me, Iran is the different kinds of rulers, including those of today. I am proud to say I am Iranian with all the splendour and the pain. But, really, I’m not that bothered about terms, and will use Persian and Iranian interchangeably. What I am bothered about is when Persians/Iranians insist that their opinion is right. Worse: when someone who is not Persian/Iranian believes they know better than the people actually involved. I am here to be that one controversial off-the-path voice, telling you that Islam is not bad, and that it belongs to Iran. But that’s a different story now, and you can read all about it here. Now onto punctuation!
Persian is an indo-european language, that means it’s closer to Hindi or French than it is to Arabic, although it uses most of the Arabic alphabet, and something like 60% of Arabic words. Many proud (nationalistic?) Persians will say it’s much less, more like 20%, but in my personal experience, that is not true. And while I’m extremely patriotic, I’m not nationalistic, so I don’t mind at all that our sweet language has received such a large Arabic influence after the Muslim conquest. I think it’s rather wonderful that the original character of Persian has persisted, its grammar for example, and soft melodious pronunciation. It’s really a bit like English and 1066 and all that. I would even contend Norman French and its Latin roots had a much higher impact on Old English than Arabic had on Persian because it changed the very bones of English, but while I do have a reading knowledge of Anglo-Saxon, I’m not a historical linguist, so don’t quote me!
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So, Persian today is as mixed a language as Iran and Iranian history and culture is. Let’s go back in reverse-chronological order, starting with current punctuation, and arriving at pre-Islamic text. For 1400 years, Arabic did not have much punctuation to speak of, and hence neither did Persian. How modern Arabic (and thus also Persian) got its punctuation is an exciting and highly political story that needs its own entry (next week!). Today, both languages use the exact same marks as European languages do, meaning the full stop, comma, semicolon, colon, exclamation mark, and question mark, while those characters with a directionality such as ? will be reversed ؟, since Arabic and Persian are read from right to left.
Before the end of the 19th century, when the European punctuation repertoire was wholesale imported into Arabic and Persian via French, neither of the languages had any of those signs.
There are spaces between words which is a subcategory of punctuation, because punctuation is anything that organises text, ranging from a ? to a & to CAPITAL LETTERS, italics, footnotes 1), or paragraphing ¶. Or, indeed spaces between words (for more on this, click here). Arabic/Persian had never been a language of individual letters on a string to which we have to add tiny ligatures (binding lines). Letters had always been joined, making it clear where one word starts and ends. That’s a huge advantage already, but we readers love to have more crutches than just blanks.
As in Arabic and in the early history of European punctuation, Persian had swirls and circles and stylized flowers for decoration (such as the Roman hedera, or ivy leaf ☙). They functioned as decoration, but also as non-alphabetical signs separating subjects from one another, less often sentences.
Some signs like the one in the manuscript above would separate poetry from surrounding prose, as well as Arabic from Persian. That’s basically the function of quotation marks (whose history is illustrious and confusing, watch this space for more).
Early on in the history of punctuation, marks worked as flags of text-foreign material: even before the venerable head-librarian of the fabled library at Alexandria, Aristophanes of Byzantium, gave us the full stop, comma, and colon 2200 years ago, his predecessor Zenodotus of Ephesos introduced a symbol to attach to spurious lines in manuscripts telling the great epics on the fall of Troy and Odysseus’ wanderings around the Mediterranean. One purpose of the great collection of scrolls in Alexandria was to work towards the (supposedly) original of the story, so all the different versions swarming around would be tested by the best Greek readers and most knowledgeable literary critics. Lines that probably did not belong, were duplicated, or otherwise faulty were marked with different symbols. One (the asterisk *) is still with us, the others are not. So, punctuation has always meant navigating the black waves of letters on the white sea of the page, whether the culture in question was Greek-influenced Egypt or Iran.
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Eyes, tear drops, roses…why not dots and dashes? Well. This is the million-dollar question. Firstly, a 🌺 or a ! are not that different in that they’re both non-alphabetical, that is, they’re not actual letters. They’re something else, an abstract sign, suggesting tone (! = “read this with emphasis”), or a simplified picture of a thing out there in the world (🌺 much like an emoji). They’re something extraneous, something beyond language, while they both indicate what to do with that language. They separate words and sentences in order to make it easier for us to digest chunks of text – the quintessential task of punctuation. What the Persian/Arabic signs are largely not doing is offering granular grammatical and tonal information: they don’t show up the minutiae of clauses, nor do they tell us what to do with our voice when reading aloud or in our heads.
There are several potential reasons for this relative paucity of punctuation that (truth be told) I still have to understand: one could be that Arabic and Persian just don’t need much punctuation for their daily functioning. And frankly, do we really need so many little hooks and nooks and crannies of semi-colons, and different-sized dashes and apostrophes and things? (For the (un)natural loss of punctuation marks, click here for this long musing on hyphens.) Mum’s the word: we don’t need all the signs we now have. what if i write like this without punctuation its not like you wouldnt be able to make head nor tail of this space between words is really all we need to get the majority of our meaning across
But of course we need punctuation. For the nuances. For the secrets of thought. For the ambiguities of feeling. So, Persian grammar can certainly do the work punctuation is usually tasked with, and carry meaning perfectly fine, but a lack of marks slows down communication as we need to make more of an interpretive effort. In the example without full stops above, “make head nor tail of this space between words” contains something of an apo koinou – that’s when the end of a sentence could also be the beginning of the next one. “make head nor tail of this. Space between words” is the precise punctuation, but “this” could also modify “space”. Of course, it can’t because “tail of” can’t hang there, dangling. The point is that the missing full stop and capitalisation creates room for doubt and our eyes and minds need to return and re-read and lose time.
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Punctuation saves time, and punctuation also makes writing accessible to someone who might not be overly schooled in the language at hand. Arabic is an incredibly complex language which requires years and years of study for true mastery. The more you’re used to reading a language, the more comfortable you feel in it, and the less will you need punctuation as signposts along the way. As in the original days of punctuation invention in Alexandria, commas and colons are crutches for inexperienced readers. Now, I’m not an expert in the history of literacy in Persian or Arabic-speaking countries, but what I can say is that an explosion in punctuation marks between 1500 and 1630 went hand in hand with a huge increase in literacy and education (okay, the professionalisation of the printing press was pretty instrumental, too).
So, I wonder whether Arabic/Persian text was guarded from more intricate punctuation for so long, because those who read and wrote knew what a tool of power text is. Once you allow that tool slipping out of the grip of the few, anything might happen. Social, political, religious revolutions. That’s what happened in the West anyway. It’s not a coincidence that “punctuation” in Urdu means ramoz-e aghaf which could be translated as “indication of stopping” – but ramz means “mystery” or “code”. Punctuation is the key to unlock the secret of text. It is a democratising force. Under-estimated, invisible, but all the more powerful for that.
¶
Persian names of punctuation give evidence of the two languages that had influence over it: Arabic and French. It’s not “comma” but virgule from French. And alamat-e ta’ajob from the Arabic for “sign for exclamation/surprise/admiration”. Since punctuation names a mixture of the two, I’d be inclined to believe punctuation was imported into Persian via both French and Arabic, or perhaps via Arabic (which took the marks from French in the beginning of the 20th century). I haven’t found any evidence-based studies on the timeline, so all of this is guesswork.
However, since Persian is not an offshoot of Arabic, there’s also a pre-islamic history of writing. Before the Muslim/Arab conquest in the late-seventh century, Iranians wrote in Pahlavi, a written form of different kinds of Iranian languages at the time. Pahlavi used a script derived from Aramaic; its punctuation was similar to that in Syriac texts.
Pahlavi also used rubrication, that is, colour-codes for lines with different meanings or tasks: titles, abbreviations, or ritual instructions are often written in a brighter colour (red) as opposed to the day-to-day black.
Where does that leave us? Why should we care? Firstly, because. This endeavour of life doesn’t need a capitalist justification. We can be interested in things, because they’re, well, interesting. We don’t always need this-day-and-age take-aways. Secondly, and here I’m going all big picture stuff, punctuation is an attendant of writing from the very beginning thousands of years ago. Not only an attendant - it’s an intrinsic part. It evolved, because we did. And perhaps even the other way around. Punctuation impacts politics, manages social relationships, and exists in nearly all languages, from Braille (for the blind) to Japanese to Amharic. We poked holes into clay tablets, drew lines on papyrus, punched calf-skin parchment, and pressed marks onto paper from linen rags. And we found those marks important enough to carry them over into our new digital world, where computer-generated answer-machine ChatGPT uses them just as we do. The computer infuses the human element into its regurgitation of words through a well-placed enthusiastic !. Punctuation has always been, and will always be around. Well, as long as we humans are, anyway. And that’s what Persian punctuation means.
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Information and pictures taken from: ‘The Investigation of Punctuation in Photographic Copies of Persian Writing’ in Theory and Practice in Language Studies Vol. 2, No. 5 (2012), 1090-1097 by Azam Estaji and Ailin Firooziyan Pooresfahani.