Fingilish

Fingilish (Persian: فینگلیش) (a portmanteau of Farsi and English) or Fargelisi (Persian: فارگلیسی) is the way Persian is written using the Latin alphabet (as opposed to the Persian alphabet), or generally the casual romanization of Persian alphabet popularized after computers, emailing and online chat became ubiquitous. The idea of writing Persian using the Latin alphabet was first proposed by Mirza Fatali Akhundzade during Persian Constitutional Revolution but it didn't become so popular during his era.^[1] This type of writing is commonly used in online chat, social networks, emails and SMS. It developed and spread due to a former lack of software supporting the Persian alphabet, and/or due to a lack of knowledge about the software that was available.Although Persian writing is supported in recent operating systems, there are still many cases where the Persian alphabet is unavailable and there is a need for an alternative way to write Persian with the Latin alphabet.

The following table contains some examples of romanized Persian words and the ways they are used by Persian chat users.

There is software to help transliterate from Fingilish to Persian and vice versa. For example, Google has added a page to its Google Transliteration set that can be used to transliterate from Fingilish into Persian script. There are also communities and message groups for Fingilish on some famous websites like Facebook.

Social Acceptance

Writing Fingilish is confined to (very) informal communication. It is considered to be highly inappropriate to write official or polite messages in Fingilish; this reaches the point that, when there is no way to write the Persian alphabet, communication occurs directly in English rather Fingilish. Uses of Fingilish are often confined to mobile messaging, including SMS, messaging apps as well as online messaging programs. The use of the portmaneu language has lessened in recent years as more mobile phones offer Persian keyboards and users are no longer subjected to Arabic keyboards which miss Persian letters.

Official usage

The front page of Kommunisti Isfara from 15 May 1936.

The Latin script was introduced officially in Tajikistan, for Tajiki Persian, after the Russian Revolution of 1917. The main goal was facilitating an increase in literacy and distance the language from Arabic and Islamic influence. Only lowercase letters were found in the first versions of the Latin variant, between 1926-9. A slightly different version used by Jews speaking the Bukhori dialect, who included three extra characters for phonemes not found in the other dialects: ů, ə̧, and ḩ. (Note that "c" and "ç" are switched relative to their usage in the Turkish alphabet, which has formed the basis for other Latin scripts in the former Soviet Union.)

The unusual character Ƣ is called Gha and represents the phoneme /ɣ/. The character is found in the Common Turkic Alphabet in which most non-Slavic languages of the Soviet Union were written until the late 1930s. The Latin alphabet is not officially used today, although the adoption of it is advocated by certain Pan-Iranism groups.

Problems of current Persian alphabet

• A student interested in mastering the Perso-Arabic writing will need to memorize the convoluted spellings of almost all words, and their complex rules and many exceptions. To master reading and writing in Perso-Arabic takes at least 9 years of dedicated daily practice. Yet, a large percentage of the educated adult population of Iran has difficulty correctly reading the literary works of the great writers and poets such as Golestan and Boustan of Sa'di, Masnavi of Balkhi (aka Rumi), or Shahnameh of Ferdowsi. Another significant percentage of the educated adult population has difficulty reading through a newspaper article without pronunciation errors or writing essays without making spelling mistakes.
• Officially there are 32 primary letters in the Perso-Arabic alphabet and 9 secondary symbols. The 32 letters can take on a total of 118 different shapes altogether, depending on their location inside a word. To add to this confusing multitude of letters and symbols is the fact that there are several renegade letters and symbols that are not officially counted, but do exist in some Arabic loan words. So the total number of letters and symbols can vary anywhere from 42 to 44 to 46 to 131.
• Lack of short vowels: the short vowels: a, e, and o are not part of the body of a word. In rare occasions, usually reserved for beginners, three floating symbols are used in their place. These in addition to 6 other symbols, make up the 9 secondary symbols of the Perso-Arabic alphabet. Without the short vowels, exact or correct pronunciation of the words is difficult and only possible with prior knowledge. New or unfamiliar words such as foreign ones are impossible to pronounce correctly. The lack of these vowels results in many examples of words with different pronunciations sharing the same spelling. The only way to distinguish these words is by the context of the sentence in which they appear.
• The existence of exclusively Arabic consonants. Unlike Arabic where the sounds of these consonants are different, in Persian no such difference exists. This makes spelling of words a challenge for ones memory.
• Out of the total of 32 letters of the alphabet there are only 17 distinguishable shapes. The complete letters of the alphabet are created by adding dots and lines as diacritics to the different shapes. Dots and lines are thus the only differentiating symbols between many consonants. This is a source of many errors.

Some letters of the alphabet take on different shapes depending on their occurrence at the beginning, middle, or the end of a word or if they occur separately.

• Within a word, some letters have to be attached to their preceding and/or following letters while others do not.

A great number of Persian words end with the letter "h". The sound of this letter remains the same, regardless of its location within a word, unless it occurs at the end of a word. The consonant "h" could then retain its normal sound or convert into the vowels "e" or "a". Yet again we are confronted with a phenomenon that results in many different sounding words sharing a common spelling.

• Unlike words written in the Latin alphabet that appear as one integrated grouping of letters, words written in Perso-Arabic can appear as scattered, uncorrelated set of letters. This is due to reason 7 above where some letters could be attached to others and some not.

Equivalency of letters

The table below shows how the Latin alphabet is used to transliterate the Persian language.

Table of equivalency of letters in Fingilish:

See also

• Romanization of Persian
• Persian alphabet

References

External links

• behnevis.com. Interactive web based Persian transliterator
• eMonshi.com. Interactive web based Persian transliterator
• En2Fa. Pingilish into Persian translator program