Farsi Turns into Lao

I started working with Farsi, the language of Iran. It's an Indo-european language with a hefty dose of Arabic thrown in for good measure. What surprised me was how like other Indo-european languages it was in its constituent parts; some of it was amazingly similar to Russian, others parts of echoed German or French. What was really odd was learning that "good" and "bad" are pronounced "khud" and "bad" and that the Farsi word for "better" is essentially "better". After dissecting the Farsi to the best of my ability, I put it back together again in a form I hoped would help me speak it when I needed to.

I still didn't know if the system worked, so I tracked down a person who spoke Farsi and extemporaneously created a few sentences using my system. It worked! She understood what I was trying to say. Unfortunately she was unable to give me any further help. She'd been living in America since she was a child and knew Farsi more as a run-on collection of phrases and didn't seem to have the ablility to break down the language down into individual components. Nonetheless, I was very happy with the results.

At this point, one of my friends told me she was going to Laos. I saw this as a golden opportunity to test out my idea. With a definite deadline, I set to work and a month later had a rudimentary Lao phrasemaker for her. Like all projects, time had allowed for extra thought and the final product was very different to the original Farsi version. It was more complex and refined, yet easier to use. I gave her two versions: one used concertina style pages, the other was like the cover and back page of a magazine with all the middle pages missing.

I was very excited and awaited her return with baited breath.

She didn't use it. It was a business trip and all the people she came into contact with spoke English. I was disappointed and now had a nagging feeling I'd made the system too complex.
More in the next post.