“Don’t Hurt Your Hand”

Photo by Hamed Saber

By Heidi Noroozy

When my Iranian in-laws first came to stay with us, I decided I needed to learn a few words of Farsi so we could communicate without requiring constant translation. So I asked my husband to supply a few useful phrases—hello, goodbye, please, and thank you, for starters.

What I didn’t anticipate was the slew of options he offered for “thanks”—mersi, mamnoon, motshakkeram, to name but a few. Who knew that there were so many ways to express gratitude?

“Just say mersi,” he advised.

I could get my mind around that one. It was easy to pronounce. Better yet, it was already familiar, having been borrowed from French. But soon I realized that the word sometimes came up a bit short. In a culture that has had millennia to perfect the art of gratitude, often what is said is less important than what is left unspoken. Mersi just doesn’t say enough.

Then I learned this useful phrase: dast-e shoma dard nakoneh. It covers many situations but is usually offered at the end of a meal to thank a hostess for preparing the delicious feast. Literally, it means “don’t hurt your hand.” And the phrase even has a standard response: sar-e shoma dard nakoneh, or “don’t hurt your face.” At first, I thought this was a joke. “Don’t hurt your face?” It sounds like something Groucho Marx might say.

But it’s meant quite seriously. In fact, the exchange is far more than “thank you” and “you’re welcome.” The guest is acknowledging how much hard work went into preparing the meal, which, in Iran, probably took all day and multiple sets of helping hands to prepare. The hostess, in turn, is graciously accepting the praise and expressing her joy at the opportunity to provide such a satisfying meal.

A similar expression took me longer to figure out, partly because it means something different in every situation: khasteh naboshi (literally “don’t tire yourself out”). If followed by a request for a favor, it means “I hate to trouble you, but…” On another occasion, it might be offered in acknowledgement of a favor rendered, in which case it’s more like, “you shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble.” And you might say this even if you were the one asking the favor in the first place.

Things get even more complicated in a situation like this: Last year, when my mother-in-law was recovering from knee surgery and hobbling around with a cane, she couldn’t do her household chores for several months. I pitched in with the cooking and cleaning. At the end of the day, I’d sit down with a glass of tea after the washing up was done, and she’d give me a sad look and say, “khasteh naboshi.” Translation: “thank you and I’m sorry I couldn’t help out.” Gratitude and apology rolled up into one convenient phrase.

Try to pack all that meaning into a simple, easy-to-pronounce mersi.

Carrying Cumin to Kerman

By Heidi Noroozy

Ever since my college days, I’ve collected proverbs, those metaphorical sayings that express a universal truth. It all started because one of my German professors who’d specialized in folklore brought his love of these sayings into the classroom. He had us collect examples of proverbs and their representations in art and popular culture, and when we stumbled over points of grammar and hard-to-remember vocabulary, he’d urge us to keep trying. “Aller guten Dinge sind drei,” he’d say. Three’s a charm.

To celebrate his own favorite—“see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” (nichts sehen, nichts hören, nichts sagen in German)—my professor filled his office with images of the three wise monkeys associated with this phrase. It is what people say when they don’t want to involve themselves in a situation that is likely to bring them trouble. Although I’ve often heard that this proverb originated in Japan or China, I can’t help noticing how similar it is to the Zoroastrian principle of “think good thoughts, speak good words, do good deeds.”

My husband shares my love of proverbs, although he doesn’t always realize his favorite sayings hail from these pithy expressions, and he tends to translate them into English literally. Early in our marriage he’d accuse me of “being in another garden” when he had trouble getting my attention. Unfortunately for him, even today I’m often in another world, a fictional realm that can feel more real to me than my physical reality—especially when I’m deep in the first draft of a story.

Or when I’m out of sorts and complaining too much, he’ll say “the food is always tastier in the neighbor’s house.” Yes, I know—the grass is greener… To be honest, I never really understood the English equivalent of this proverb. Why should I care where the grass is the greenest? If I were a cow, horse, or even a goat, perhaps it would make sense. But show me the way to a good meal, and I’ll follow you anywhere.

Another one of my favorite Farsi proverbs has an equivalent in many languages: zeyereh be Kerman bordan (carrying cumin to Kerman). It means to engage in pointless activity, the equivalent of carrying coals to Newcastle. Just as Newcastle was once a major coal-exporting town, the Iranian city of Kerman is famous for its cumin. I like this proverb because it lends itself to endless variations: carrying roses to Kashan, tea to Lahijan, or carpets to, well, just about anywhere in Iran.

Do you have a favorite proverb? If you do, share it in our comments section—in any language you like!

Talking the Talk

I have a life-long love of learning foreign languages. I see them as the clearest window into another culture. Learning another language is the best way to gain an understanding of how people in other countries think and view the world.

I’ve learned Farsi almost entirely through immersion, with my husband, his relatives, and Iranian friends as my teachers. It all began the first time my in-laws came to stay with us—and remained for six months. Farsi became the language of our home, and I picked up quite a lot without even noticing my progress.

In the early days, I’d sit at the kitchen counter helping my mother-in-law prepare the evening meal, while she told me the names of various food items and cooking methods: jafari (parsley), tadiq (the crispy rice from the bottom of the pot), joosh miad (the water is boiling). I learned that Iranians don’t express their preference for tea based on its taste (strong or weak), but rather by its appearance: por rang (dark or “colorful”) and kam rang (less dark).

As my Farsi skills improved, I discovered that my husband and I have very different concepts of what constitutes fluency in a language. I’ve always believed that the best measure is how well you master colloquial speech. If a non-native English-speaker says to me: “Check it out. That lazy s.o.b. totally phoned it in this time,” I’ll never even notice he said it with a Spanish accent.

Which makes things only frustrating when I practice Farsi on my husband and he responds like this “Don’t say goshneh-ee. You sound like a peasant.” Never mind that’s exactly how he’d phrase the question “are you hungry?” I’m supposed to use the more formal gorosneh hasti.

It puzzled me that he insists I talk like a classroom textbook until the time I wanted to tell my mother-in-law something, but couldn’t quite remember what. I stumbled a bit, then said faramoosh kardam. I forgot.

A big smile spread over her race and she told me how elegant my Farsi sounds.

Elegant? I stared at her blankly. On a good day, the best I can say about my Farsi skills is that the language rolls off my tongue without getting snagged somewhere. On a bad day, it feels like I’m choking out the words, one by one.

My husband stepped in and explained. “You could have said yadam raft. Faramoosh kardam is more formal.” (Guess who taught me that one.)

I started getting compliments: “You speak Farsi so well” or even: “You speak it better than we do.”

Oh sure! I assumed the aunt who told me that was engaging in another peculiarly Iranian cultural practice called ta’aroff—the art of dissembling, of telling white lies out of an excessive sense of politeness.

But then I realized what she really meant. That I spoke the language more “properly” than she did. Not more fluently, smoothly, or confidently. She thought my speech sounded educated, compared to a native’s more informal idiom. Which is never a bad thing in Iranian culture.

So now when I complain that my Farsi sounds stilted and unnatural, my husband suggests that I work on my accent. In his opinion, fluency is judged by how much you sound like a native, not whether you master the local slang.

What about you? Do you speak any foreign languages and how do you judge when you’ve become fluent?

How Many Syllables Are in That Word?

When most Americans see Arabic script, the first thing that comes to mind is Islam, the Koran and perhaps those blue and gold postage stamps commemorating the holy month of Ramadan.

I, on the other hand, think of a former linguistics professor who once gave our class an unusual exercise. She put a big sheet of Arabic writing on the wall and asked us to describe what we saw. The lines reminded me of a time when, as a small child not yet able to read, I used to draw pictures and scribble squiggly lines underneath, my first crude attempts at writing a story. The Arabic looked a lot like those scribbles. Only prettier.

No matter how hard I squinted at the script on the classroom wall, I couldn’t tell where one word ended and the next began. There were dots everywhere, but nothing that resembled punctuation. For the first time in decades, I felt illiterate.

Fifteen years later, my Iranian husband’s parents came to live with us, and in a few months I had acquired rudimentary Farsi conversation skills. But the language uses the Arabic script so I still couldn’t read or write a single word. Unacceptable.

My husband patiently wrote out the Farsi version of the Arabic alphabet for me, all thirty-two letters (four more than in Arabic), then showed me how to form them. I tackled the problem much the way I’d learned to write the Latin alphabet, taking each letter in order and practicing its various forms. I had vague memories of first grade and lines of letters marching across the page: Aa, Bb, Cc and on to Zz. So I tried creating similar lines of آ to ى.

Unfortunately, the Arabic script doesn’t work like the Latin one. For one thing, it’s written in cursive style from right to left, except for the numbers which go from left to right. Then there are four forms to most letters, not just two, depending on where they occur in a word: beginning, middle, end or sitting all lonesome on their own. And here’s the clincher: even after breaking the words down into individual letters, the script still looks like bewildering squiggles, each symbol distinguished from its sisters only by the number and placement of the associated dots.

So is jim (prounounced like the man’s name) the one with the dot in the middle of the loop (ج) or above the letter (خ)? Is the ت with two dots above the line pronounced like a T, or is that the one with a single dot below the line? Nope, ب sounds like a B.

I was nearly at my wit’s end, figuring I’d never learn to read Farsi, when a cousin in Iran came to the rescue. She sent me a set of first-grade primers with pictures. Bingo! Turns out, Iranian kids don’t learn their letters by memorizing the alphabet from alef to ye. Instead the letters are presented in sets, so you learn these together: ب ت ث, and then these: ح ج خ . So much easier to remember where the dots are supposed to go this way.

I know the Arabic script now, but that doesn’t mean I can read the language with ease. That’s because Farsi has one more bewildering quirk: you don’t write the vowels! Vowel symbols do exist, but no literate person would be caught dead using them in written form.

So how do you sound out an unfamiliar word? Simple answer: you don’t. When all I’ve got are two or three consonants to work with, I can’t even tell how many syllables the word contains.

Over time, I’ve gotten a better feel for Farsi and its linguistic patterns, which makes reading easier as well. Sometimes I can even correctly guess those unfamiliar words. One thing is certain: practice makes perfect, and the more Farsi I read, the easier it becomes.