Persian plus
Persian plus all those other wonderful Persian words that enrich it

November 10, 2005
iranian.com

A few weeks back my hometown newspaper reported a story by the Associated Press that King Tutankhamen was a red wine drinker. In the same story one Patrick McGovern, an American molecular archeologist, was cited as saying that he has discovered grape residue in northern Iran that dates winemaking to 5400 BC.

I do not know what the ancient Iranians inhabiting the north of the country may have called this elixir. If they called it by the Persian may is mostly irrelevant because in today’s Farsi the commonly known word for the term is sharab, a word from the Arabic root sharb, to drink. I am writing today, however, to make the case for Farsi, our national language, being a sort of Persian plus – Persian plus all those other wonderful Persian words that enrich it.

Speaking of drinks and drinking – None is more popular a drink in Iran than chaiy (pronounced: cha – ee), even in the coffeehouses! The English call it tea. No Englishman or Iranian sipping this daily libation would think for a moment that when he calls for it that he is uttering Chinese. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica (15th ed. 1981) the plant known generally to the botanist as Camellia sinesis originated in China about 2700 BC, when it was called in ancient Chinese probably kia.

According to that source and Oxford English Dictionary, generally, Chinese knew the word for this plant by two ideograms that pronounced “tay” in the Amoy and “cha” in Cantonese and Mandarin dialects. The family of t-based words for this product (like tea, the, etc.) was brought into European languages by the Dutch. The Portuguese brought the family of the ch-based words (cha, cia, etc.) to the European languages. With the exception of Arabic that called it shay, because it had not the ch sound, in Persian, Urdu, Turkish and Russian the word is a variation of cha.

At my grandmother’s some fifty years ago, I recall, having tea was a delightful little ritual that began by the spinning of the coal lumps in a canister attached to a string (atesh or zoghal gardan, fire or coal twirler) that the kitchen help would spin with sufficient verve in order to get them to glow. The lumps would be placed in the fluted chamber of the larger containment vessel.

Water was added to the containment vessel and the smoldering lumps of coal heated the water. By opening a tiny spigot that jutted out from the belly of the contraption, steaming water was introduced to the tealeaves that lined the bottom of the ornate teapot. The teapot would be placed atop the samovar, capped yet with an ornate quilted hat – a cozy -- to keep it all nice and steamy. In Persian, the cozy (cosy) is dam kon (literally, that which steams).

According to Dehkhoda’s Loghat-Nameh, the word samovar is Russian. My friend Irina states that in this form the word samo means “self” and var means “boil,” so samovar literally means “self-boiler.” Pity. Why is it that a culture that preceded the Russians by thousands of years, which invented the wind flue-towers of Yazd, which heated the bath water with a single candle and constructed swaying dual towers could not come up with a word of its own for samovar.

If the Academy of Sciences (Farhangestan-e Ulum) in Iran was looking for a Farsi word for samovar, it may want to consider that the phrase ab-joush-avardan (to boil water) contains all the linguistic requisites for the coinage of the word joushavar as “boiler.” There are no doubt other possibilities. One could call the samovar ab garm kon (water heater), but that term has been used generally to denote the household water heater. Ab garm kardan (literally, to heat water) is generally a term signifying warming up, cozying up to someone.

For the Russian samovar, in Persian, I personally prefer the term damavar. It is made up of dam (steam) and avar (bring forth) and it sounds very much like samovar!

When I lived in Moscow, the household’s Russophone members referred to naughty boys as “nakhal.” I always knew that the word was Russian and so I asked my friend Irina to translate it for me in her own language. Sure enough, according to her Russian, the term means “an obnoxious person, a jerk.” It is my contention that the term probably entered the Russian language from the Farsi nokhaleh, which means among other things coarse, leftover from a refinement/sifting process, a nasty person, ill bred. In its original form it was probably na-khaless, impure. In Persian, however, the more customary way to refer to a naughty boy is naghola (trickster, impish, clever, sly), which could have been a variant of nokhaleh.

Among Iranians, usually, chaiy is consumed either in its natural bitter (talkh) or with something sweet. One such sweetener is called noql, which is a white oblong-roundish concoction of sugar-water and binding agent dried around a sliver of nut, usually pistachio. With tea or not, noql is an ever present item in an Iranian hospitality room. At weddings, handful of it is showered on the betrothed. At Norouz, the New Year, or other festive occasions, noql is used, figuratively and literally, to sweeten the mood. 

I am not sure about the origin of the word noql. Dehkhoda seems to suggest that the word describing this quintessentially Iranian thing probably entered Farsi from the Arabic tonoql. In Farsi the term (variant tanaqol) signifies anything that is like sweets and dried fruits and nuts (ajil) and the like. Typically, tanaqol can be had as a snack but more frequently it is an accompaniment (mazeh) to other food or beverage indulgences.

The word tanaqol in its plural from is tanaqolat, which is synonymous with “distractions” or as the French may say “amuse gueule.” Not in Tehran, but in Gilan and Mazandaran I remember panhandlers on the beach selling in cone-shaped paper wrappers what they called mashghouliyat, literally meaning “amusement.” It could have been any number of Iranian snacks – dried nuts and fruits or roasted watermelon, pumpkin or sunflower seeds.

This brings me to where I began with the evidence of winemaking in northern Iran. If today’s beer or whiskey drinker enjoys his fare with pistachio and the vodka drinker enjoys it with caviar or with cucumber-and-yogurt, what would the ancient Iranian wine drinker have for his tanaqol or mazeh. Dry and salted fish, dry bread, pain, love, or nothing at all?

About
Guive Mirfendereski is a professorial lecturer in international relations and law and is the principal artisan at trapworks.com. Born in Tehran in 1952, he is a graduate of Georgetown University's College of Arts and Sciences (BA), Tufts University's Fletcher School (PhD, MALD, MA) and Boston College Law School (JD). He is the author of A Diplomatic History of the Caspian Sea >>> Features in iranian.com