Tajik

To many Westerners, the Arabic script just looks like a series of squiggles.  Perhaps very beautiful squiggles, but squiggles nonetheless.  I could disquisit at this point on Islamic calligraphy, but I won't.  I will, however, say a little bit.  Arabic script is potentially very beautiful, as are the Arabesques associated with them in architecture and other art.  Two very significant mainstream styles of calligraphy used in everyday writing include Nastaʿlīq, used for Urdu, and Naskh, used for Arabic itself.  Kufic is another style, whose subtype Square Kufic is very distinctively, well, square:

I'm not entirely ignorant of Arabic script but I'm really not good at it.  I'm about at the level of a reception-class child with reading and writing, although I do write it more neatly.  Arabic is a good script for writing Arabic, and I imagine also Hebrew, because it clearly separates vowels and consonants and often omits the former.  There's a sign a couple of hundred metres from this place welcoming Afghans to the town and if I stand there looking at it for about thirty seconds I can just about make out what it says.  It's in Pashto.  Other languages written in the Arabic script, and there are many, tend not to be Afro-Asiatic although they have often borrowed extensive vocabulary from Arabic.  Those loanwords are fine, but not the rest of the language.  Consequently I find it frustrating when languages formerly using scripts other than Arabic adopt it for religious or political reasons.

One thing that Arabic script does rather well is obscure the familiarity some languages written in them would have to Anglophones if we could read them more easily.  For instance, Afrikaans of all things has been written in Arabic script, in the 1830s, in a madrasa in Cape Town.  افركانس does actually say "afrikaans" in Arabic script but unless you knew the script you'd never guess, and since it seems to say something like "'frk'ns" you might not even if you can read it.  To be fair, the letter alif is often used to represent A, so "afrkans" might be more legible but it's still an uphill struggle for someone used to reading and writing scripts derived from Greek such as our own.  I'm just going to be lazy here and use a text from Wikipedia:

ان دى كونڠ سكپ اس بيدى هوك الله تعالا ان ڤارلك الله تعالا اس باس فر الدى اتس

This apparently reads "En die koningskap is by die hoë Allah ta`ālā en waarlik Allah ta`ālā is die baas van alle dinge.", but I can't make it out in the Arabic script.  It is, however, interesting that it uses الله and not "God" (in Arabic), which is the Afrikaans word for "God", because this reflects a widespread tendency for non-Afroasiatic languages written in Arabic script to borrow extensively from Arabic.  A whole debate could be had here about whether "Allah" and "God" are synonyms, but I won't go into that right now.

It's been claimed that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.  Why navy?  Does that mean there are landlocked states with no language?  How do they communicate in Liechtenstein then?  Apparently this was first said by Max Weinreich in 1945:

אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמיי און פֿלאָט

a shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un flot

 Since he spoke Yiddish, it makes a very clear point as there are a number of Jewish languages which have not been taken seriously because they are in a sense used by stateless people, and Israel's official language is neither Yiddish nor Ladino but Hebrew, which I think is sad but also makes a point about their national identity.  There are examples of languages which are officially regarded as separate but in fact only seem so because they use different scripts, obvious examples being Serbian and Croatian, and also Urdu and Hindi.  In the latter case there is probably more difference than the former since Urdu uses more words of Arabic origin and Hindi more Sanskrit-derived terms.  The distinction between Serbian and Croatian is less marked and the main distinction is simply that one uses Cyrillic and the other Latin script.  In fact I can't even recall which uses which, because I've always regarded them as one language.

This brings me to the actual subject of this post:  Tajik.  Tajik may at first appear to be an obscure language which nobody in the West without a special interest in Tajikistan would be motivated to learn for practical reasons.  However, this is not so, for the reasons I've hinted at above.  Tajik is one of three languages which are widely regarded as separate, the other two being Dari and Farsi.  Farsi is the biggest and most significant one, and is also notable in that it doesn't have a definite name in English.  Though I've called it Farsi here, it's also known as Persian and I've heard it called "Irani", although I don't know if that was just one person not knowing what to call it in English.  In Iran, it is of course the official language, and under the name Dari it's an official language in Afghanistan, a status it shares with the related Pashto, which incidentally also has several names (it can be called Pushtu or Afghani).  Finally, in Tajikistan it's called Tajik, or at least that's how it's spelt in English.  Farsi and Dari both use the Arabic script.  Tajik, however, uses Cyrillic, and this comes to my rescue.

Back when I was about twelve, I decided to learn Russian.  I found the Cyrillic script beautiful and intriguing, at least as printed.  I didn't get very far with Russian, however, because for some reason I came across the word «идёт» and it completely floored me.  I couldn't for the life of me find out what it meant and ground to a halt.  I was clearly too easily discouraged.  Apparently it's basically the same as the German "geht", although I'm not confident about that even now.  It probably says a lot about me, or at least my state of mind in 1979, that I gave up at this point, as it was quite a major undertaking and there were cognitive sunk costs involved.  One of the legacies of this abortive attempt to learn Russian was that I got to know the Cyrillic alphabet as used to write Russian really well.  Later on, I became aware of the variants in Cyrillic, first of all the Serbian version and soon after the Bulgarian, which is probably the original.  Later still, I realised it had also been used to write all sorts of languages in the soon-to-be-former Soviet Union and Outer Mongolia.  It's alleged that Stalin actually deliberately introduced variations in the scripts to make it harder for the separate republics to communicate with each other in a divide-and-rule strategy.  I do remember that one of the languages actually uses an ampersand as a letter, which seems very strange and possibly suspicious.  For some reason, the Baltic states still used Latin script.  I don't know what led to this and it seems quite anomalous.

As the various Asian states became independent, they sometimes expressed their national identity, which was often connected to Islam, by adopting Arabic script.  It's understandable that they did this, but to Westerners and those used to Cyrillic it created an extra barrier to understanding.  Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Tajik and Uzbek all used Arabic script just after the 1917 revolution but this was banned in the 1920s.  Soviet authorities introduced Cyrillic in order to help speakers of those languages to learn Russian and were concerned that if Latin script were used, it would lead to a subversive Pan-Turkic literature which would draw those states towards Turkey politically.  Kamal Atatürk adopted a rather quirky version of Latin script in Turkey itself in 1926, replacing the former Arabic script.  Many Russian loan words were introduced into the languages as well as widely-used international terms such as «телефон».  In the case of Tajikistan, the idea was to isolate it from Perso-Arabic culture rather than Turkic.

This policy means that Tajik is now written in Cyrillic, and that's the reason for my focus on it as opposed to Farsi.  Tajikistan declared Tajik the official language in 1994 but reserved Russian for use in communication between ethnicities.  Bilingualism is encouraged and a very large number of Tajik men work in Russia and send money home to their families.  There are a lot of Uzbek speakers there too, and that's a Turkic language. There are fewer ethnic Russians in Tajikistan than any of the other Central Asian states and this number is going down due to emigration. 

The use of Cyrillic for Tajik is therefore likely to continue.  Tajikistan is, to my shame, a far-away country of which I know little.  It borders China and I get the impression that they feel a little like an East Asian country, like China, Japan and Korea, more than a Central Asian one, but since I'm all the way over here on the opposite side of the continent, I basically know nothing.  I also reckon I'd find life very difficult if I went there because I'd find myself marginalised for all sorts of reasons.  Hence it's probably more than a little weird that I'm interested in the Tajik language, but I am, and for quite a practical reason, but before I get to that, I want to go into some of the features of Tajik which may seem a bit startling to outsiders.

Tajik is an Indo-European language almost identical to Farsi, but unlike Farsi its written form is not obscured to those who know the Greek-derived scripts because it uses Cyrillic.  The mask is off, and on becoming acquainted with it, one may realise that it's actually surprisingly familiar.  For instance, the words for "mother, father, brother, sister, daughter" are «модар, падар, бародар, хохар, духтар.» - "modar, padar, barodar, khokhar, dukhtar".  The numbers from one to ten are:  «як ду се чор панҷ шаш ҳафт ҳашт Нӯҳ даҳ», or "yak, du, se, chor, panj, shash, haft, hasht, nun, dah".  The grammar is also quite analytical, like English, and in fact "Persian" has been described as "the English of the East".  There is no grammatical gender, a single plural ending in colloquial language, two cases - nominative and accusative - and the verbs are more regular than in English.  It's SOV and pro-drop.

Why, though, am I learning it?  Well I'm not really, but what I am doing is acquiring a few phrases out of interest, the reason being that there are a lot of Christian Iranian refugees at my church.  We sing hymns in Farsi and also sometimes say the Lord's Prayer in it.  Some of the White English parishioners work with them along with Afghan refugees, and it seems worthwhile to pick up a little.  However, when one speaks unexpectedly to someone in their own language, it can sometimes feel like a line has been crossed inappropriately into intimacy, and this makes me somewhat hesitant.  Even so, because of the way my mind works I find it quite difficult not to pick up at least a little Farsi just because it's being used around me.  Another aspect of this is that Tajik is also influenced by Russian in other ways than just the Cyrillic script.  For instance, it uses many Russian loan words compared to Farsi, which I think borrowed more from French, and this may have political and social implications unknown to me.

Farsi, and therefore Tajik, was one of the first languages I was aware of which made me realise that the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis was wrong or incomplete.  I remember a glib statement made about Finnish that linked the absence of gender in the language to the fact that it introduced women's suffrage particularly early.  On the other hand, it's actually quite notable that although Arabic has a particularly strong grammatical gender binary, many of the other languages spoken in Islamic societies have no grammatical gender at all, including Malay, Swahili, Turkish and of course Farsi/Dari/Tajik.  This is not reliably so, however:  Urdu has grammatical gender for example, as has Spanish.  What's missing from Sapir-Whorf is the culture and society the language is spoken in.  Look at it this way:  people often assume a doctor is a man and a nurse a woman.  If the gender roles are particularly firmly defined in a particular society, it becomes assumed that any incidence of the word «духтур» will refer to a man and any occurrence of «ҳамшираи» is female.  No need for gender to be expressed in language if it is in the rest of the culture.

Okay, so that's all been a bit of a waffle for sure, but I just wanted to get this all down in writing.