Posted by Brett Zamir (12.248.92.43) on June 01, 2003 at 12:20:43:

In Reply to: Learning Arabic and Persian posted by Corky on May 29, 2003 at 10:24:38:

Dear Corky and all,

If someone is available with some already existing freely available materials on the internet for study of Persian and Arabic, I think some of us may appreciate the help. However, in my own research, I did not find materials suitable to my own needs, particularly for study of Persian.

I therefore started a special page within the collaborative site, http://wiktionary.org which allows visitors to the site to edit the pages and add foreign language words (alongside basic English words) to it. If you know the Persian or Arabic romanized transliterations (such as the system Shoghi Effendi adopted for the Baha'i Writings) or the HTML codes for the Arabic script characters for the English words at the site, I would like to request your help to add at least a few word translations within the table there (so that it can become usable for learners such as Corky and myself). All you need to do is visit the following site, choose one of the links, and click on "Edit this Page" (at the top or bottom of the page) and then enter in the words you know in the text box which will appear (between the appropriate brackets following the English word being translated): http://wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Basic_English_template_Indo-Iranian

or for Arabic:
http://wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Basic_English_template_Hamito-Semitic

Even your entering just a few words once or once in a while would be greatly appreciated.

The above Basic English word lists, once finished, could also be integrated with other lists allowing the words you enter to be sorted by category, enabling a thematic study of the basic words as well as an alphabetic listing. I have started a categorization template at http://wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Basic_English_template which you could also help edit (by choosing one of the letter sets at the top of the page and then editing that page by adding your own categories).

Until such time as a free online word-by-word translator for Persian (including script without the diacritical marks) may become available (to help with in-context study of the Writings), I think the above method of study may be ideal. If enough words are added, the lists could even be combined to allow learning specific multiple languages at once (as 'Abdu'l-Baha recommended for children - see #76 at http://www.bahai-library.org/compilations/education.html ). Again, though, especially if a word-by-word translator becomes available (which helps disambiguate the often omitted diacriticals by an understanding of context and which can perform word transformations), I do think you may be surprised how many of the Hidden Words will contain a good number of words already intelligible to us just by our reading even the English translations of the Writings. The translations of the Guardian may help with such study to some degree, but I do not think it can be used alone, especially if one does not have an understanding of the basics, or if a person wants to know some of the other connotations of the word in question (or its more literal meaning).

thank you,
Brett

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