Bostani
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Bostani
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The idea for this script arose from a discussion with Dr. Hamid Farroukh of Germany about the future of the Persian language, and certain problems facing young Persians in the writing of it. It is an attempt to combine modern input methods with a distinct, historically Persian look and feel. The name refers to a famous poem by Sa’di called the Bostân. [Mattias Persson provided major contributions to this project.]
It has been felt by many modern Persians that a romanization of Farsi is desirable (and perhaps inevitable) as this seems to facilitate access to international resources such as computers and the internet. There is also some interest in simplifying the spelling of Farsi, which currently uses an adaptation of the Arabic script; but many letters of Arabic are not distinguished in the Farsi pronunciation. A good example is the Persian phoneme /z/, which may be spelt with Zain, Thal, Dad or Zah, depending on the etymology of the word.
A popular romanization system for Farsi is UniPers, which uses the 26 letters of the pure Latin alphabet, plus â (A with Circumflex), š (S with Caron), ž (Z with Caron) and the apostrophe. An immediate problem with UniPers and similar renderings is that it no longer appears to be Persian at all, just a European transliteration with no historical relevance to the language. At worst, it appears as yet another imperialist westernization, which in many minds leads to cultural decay. And of course it goes left-to-right, in the opposite direction to the current Perso-arabic script.
1. One suggestion was to dispense with both the Roman and Arabic systems, and use a system more closely allied with Farsi and the Iranian culture. Might it be possible to revisit the ancient Pahlavi or Avestan alphabets, for example? Avestan was a beautiful Iranian invention, which could provide inspiration at least. Avestan is written right-to-left, and has unambiguous encoding of phonemes (although many of these phonemes are not sounded in Farsi). This chart is taken from A New Version of the Avestan Alphabet © Mattias Persson:
2. In the event that Persians would find Avestan writing too difficult to learn, or too alien in appearance -- despite its historical standing -- it might be possible to incorporate some Perso-arabic letterforms or style. For example, the diacritic dots of Perso-arabic letters are distinctive; in particular, the triple-dots of Persian are very attractive. And stylistically, the common Avestan /a/ and /a:/ are similar to a series of Perso-arabic dot holders. Avestan and Perso-arabic share many basic strokes, although in Avestan letters are not joined. In any case, since the parent of both Avestan and Arabic scripts is Aramaic, some correspondences are inevitable.
3. The underlying encoding might run left-to-right, so we would have { f â r s i } instead of { i s r â f } as in the Perso-arabic stream. In this event, the script would naturally go the same way; for a design based on Perso-arabic or Avestan, this would involve mirroring. Here is a preliminary chart of relevant letter forms, showing UniPers* and IPA transliteration, with Pahlavi, Psalter, Avestan, and Perso-arabic letters:
The images of Pahlavi and Psalter letters come from
Omniglot.
The Avestan letters come from my
Some Ancient Scripts page.
*in UniPers the letter q is used for both Ghain and Qaf, but here we have introduced ğ (G with Breve) to hold the value of Ghain, keeping q for the value of Qaf. In Tehrani Persian they are pronounced the same, but in some dialects and both the important Dari and Tajiki variants, the distinction still exists.
4. A stylized, unjoined, left-to-right version of Perso-arabic is attempted, as an interim stage. Mattias uses an LCD approach for this (below is an extract from his larger chart), while I use modified Times New Roman letters. We have also included a letter for the velar nasal, which is not officially part of the Farsi phonology but is heard in final position as /ng/:
The sample reads /yek ruzi bâd-e shomâl/ "One day the north wind".
5. Relevant letters based on reversed Avestan are also tried; in the third and sixth columns here I give the source -- Avestan, Perso-arabic, Greek, Pahlavi, Psalter, Samaritan (some are reversed and/or rotated). At this stage, some Perso-arabic dotting is being incorporated to preserve relationships familiar from the current system.
Finally, the most useful letters of each stage are brought together and developed further. Letters are added for the older vowels /e:/ and /o:/ too, and a set of capitals is introduced which features a few Avestan shapes (see /h, s, š, z, ž/). The capitals are designed to run in a single channel, and in many cases have only a loose match with the miniscule form.
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Because a keyboard encoding is already in place, we can now easily match each new glyph to a letter. In this sense, Bostani describes a font rather than a whole new writing system; if we assign a Latin-based font to the same text, we shall see the original Latin letters. Here is an image with a font following the design described above (with some further modifications). The letters are printed in Latin-alphabetic order, upper case then lower case:
Ruzist xuš va havâ na garmast va na sard
abr az roxe golzâr hami šuyad gard
bolbol be zabâne hâl nazde gole zard
faryâd konad hamâra mei bâyad xord.
Download font (TTF and keymap)
A summary of this page can also be found on
Omniglot.
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This page © Ian James - last modified May.8,2010 |
