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English-Persian Word Formation with an Eye on Culture and Thought Effects

1. Introduction

As per Carroll (2007), Locke (1690) came to change that old belief saying that thought is independent of language and language is dependent on thought. Word forms are merely reflections of some underlying ideas. It is thought which determines the selection of word forms.

In Vygotsky's view, however, language and thought are logically distinct but contingently related. Vygotsky (1962) stated that "the structure of speech is not simply the mirror image of the structure of thought." In other words, thought is restructured as it is transformed into speech, and completed in the word. He concludes that in growing up within a particular linguistically structured relationship, the child begins to perceive the world not only through its eyes but also through its speech. And later it is not just seeing but acting that is informed by words.

This study is particularly important in that it gives language students a deeper insight into learning vocabulary of the language so that they understand words better and keep them longer.

The following questions will be addressed:

1. What is the effect of thought on word formation?

2. Does culture play a role in forming words?

3. How does word formation process differ in English and Persian?

2. Review of the literature

2.0 Preliminaries

As a history of this topic, this researcher found the Chinese professor Wang Aiguo (1997) who ran a similar study to this one "A Comparison of Word-formation between Chinese and English"; yet it was quite syntactic with little reference to culture or thought patterns.

According to Wang, through studying and analyzing rules of Chinese and English word formation, both Chinese L2 and English L2 learners can also enlarge their native language vocabulary in addition to finding out the similarities and differences between the two languages concerned. Finally he came to the conclusion that through a detailed comparison of word-formation between the two languages, similarity exists between the two although they belong to different writing systems, one is graphic and the other alphabetic; one is inflectional (English) while the other is not. Both languages have compounds, affixations, conversions, blends, abbreviations and loans.

 

This researcher is particularly interested in semantics and culture by choosing colors, objects, numbers, measure units, address terms, animal terms, religious terms, flowers, stars and planetsdomains to achieve the goals of the thesis.

 

2.1 Object terms

Gopnik and Choi (1994) examined the linguistic and cognitive development of Korean- speaking children. Compared to English, Korean uses fewer nouns. They found that Korean children were delayed in categorization tasks and the naming explosion. Subsequently in 1995 they discovered that Korean children were superior to the English in means-ends abilities and success/failure words. English speakers were superior in categorization and naming; Korean used more verbs but fewer nouns.

The birth of grammar in children is also worth taking note of. They use single words as a complete sentence and follow the grammatical patterns used by their parents. The effect of social setting and children's interaction here is quite clear.

A grammatical influence on cognition was also tested by many. Some are presented here to help the topic at issue.

 

2.2 Grammatical marking of form

Carroll and Casagrande (1958) compared Navaho and English. They observed that in Navaho, the form of the verb for handling an object varies with the form or shape of the object. The verb varies if the object is a long flexible object versus a flat flexible or a long rigid one. On this basis, they proposed that Navaho-speaking children would learn to discriminate the forms of objects at an earlier age than English-speaking children do.

 

2.3 Grammatical marking of gender

English grammatical gender is limited to singular personal pronouns only- he, she, it. Spanish extends this issue to verbs and nouns as well.

Martinez and Shatz (1996) examined this effect on categorization in 3 to 4- year old children. They presented Spanish-English children with pictures of animate and inanimate objects and asked them to put in their belonging groups. There were similarities and differences in their strategies to use. One- third of the Spanish children sorted them by gender while English ones did not so. They concluded that sometimes at least young children may use grammatical gender for classification.

3. Methodology

We need to refer to word formation processes both in English and Persian in order to find out some of the sources which contributed to having a new word. In English, Word formation processes include etymology, coinage, borrowing, compounding, blending, clipping, backformation, conversion, acronyms and derivations.

Persian shares some of those suggested above yet not all of them. Etymology, coinage, borrowing, compounding, acronyms and derivations are prevalent ways of forming words in Persian as well.

3.1 Materials & instruments

A well-known short story titled Animal Farm by Orwell in English with two different translations by  Firoozbakht and  Amirshahi were utilized to find required data about the use and translation of certain words in the specified domains; besides, a Persian short story entitled " Ahuye Kuhi " authored by Mahmood Golab Darrehi was used to atone for any probable defects arisen from translation job and thereby to tap into the Persian culture.

Additionally, I should say that researcher's reference was not limited to the aforesaid books and made use of various other books as well- Burke's Street Talk containing American slangs and Perrine's English Poetry also remained in focus. They were found so rich and useful to give us lots of words which will be discussed within our specified domains.

3.2 Procedure of Data collection

The researcher used the materials mentioned above to collect required data. The data were found sufficient after referring to some other books in English such as Perrine's English Poetry and Burke's Street Talk; these two especially helped the researcher to tap an insight into the way English speakers think and how it comes to affect their building a vocabulary system.

It should be noted that the whole books were taken into critical consideration without applying any certain sampling procedure. Facing a pertinent word or a hint in the specified domains, the researcher highlighted them and hard copied for later use. Thus any categorization in domains of colors, numbers, objects, measure units, address terms ,animal terms, religious terms , flowers, stars and planets were noticed along with attention paid to special grammatical points which were expected to help find the influence of culture and thought on building the vocabulary system in both languages.

3.3. Data analysis procedure

The procedure to analyze the data was not statistic in nature; yet, this researcher made partly use of a certain framework utilized by Yarmohammadi (2002) to see into the classification and/or translation of words.

The framework at issue extends the aforesaid framework taking colors, objects, numbers, measure units, address terms, animal terms, religious terms, flowers, stars and planets into consideration, which are helpful here to achieve the goal of the thesis. Besides, a categorization of words and equivalent translations is studied syntactically from viewpoint of being simple, compound, complex, complex-compound, idioms, unities and so on.

Results and discusions

* Persian vocabulary

This language makes extensive use of word building techniques such as affixing and compounding to derive new words from roots. Persian has also had considerable contact with other languages, resulting in many borrowings.

*Local word formation

Persian language has proved to be so strong and powerful in word building and especially potent in ways a word can be built from combining affixes, stems, nouns and adjectives. Persian frequently uses derivations to build its vocabulary from nouns, adjectives, and verbal stems. New words are extensively formed by combining two existing words into a new one. An example set of words derived from a present stem combined with some of available affixes:

Persian Components English Word class

Dān                              Dān                     to know                    Verbal stem

dānesh                        dān + -esh           Knowledge               Noun

dāneshgāh                  dān + -esh + -gāh University                 Noun

Furthermore, Persian is using a repetition of words to come up with a new word. Note the words just hereunder:

'zār zār', 'galeh galeh', 'daste daste', 'sabad sabad', 'rafteh rafteh', 'andak andak', 'nāz nāzi', 'bāl bāl', 'qete'h qete'h', 'nam nam', 'tep tep' and 'kam kam' are of this category.

To talk about the sounds of birds and some animals, Persian speakers imitate them nearly in a sort of repetition. Here below come a group of such sounds:

Qār Qār konān, ba' ba', qu quli qu qu, bagh baghu, ar ar konān, ow ow, mew mew, wez wez, kuāk kuāk, qur qur, jir jir, pech pech, qāt qāt, qah qah, qod qod, haq haq etc.

In the same line with repetitions, Persian speakers often use a close similar word of a certain main word to emphasize the status or clarify the meaning. They are mostly adjectives but other parts of speech can be seen as well. The accompanied word normally means nothing special and cannot stand alone by itself. They just exist to strengthen or aggravate a situation and status. Now find hereunder a series of these words:

New word                                Parts of speech                              English equivalent

/āt o āshghāl/                               N                                                 trash, waste materials

/ xert o pert/                                 N                                                 tools of less use

/ kaj o maj/                                  adj.                                               crooked

/ doros o rās/                               adj.                                               set to rights

*External influence

Persian has influenced the vocabularies of other languages though not so much as it's influenced by them. Many Persian words have also found their way into the English language.

• Arabic influence on Persian culture

Iran's defeat and occupation by Arabs which goes back to around 13 centuries ago brought about a swarm of words into the Iranian culture. There came Pahlavi to replace Arabic and when their books were translated into Arabic by new Iranian muslins, Arabic became the language of the intellectuals: Writers, poets and philosophers as well as governmental people chose to speak and write in Arabic.

We need to note here the role of translators in importing words from other languages especially when they fail to find pure Persian equivalents.

/ qute lāyamuti nadarim/                   we have nothing to keep soul and body together

/ ma'zālek arbabe motlaq heywan ast/             the animal is the full boss , however.

/ khod rā be ālāte chamanzani mi bastand/   they tied themselves to grass mower machines

• Turkish/ Russian influence on Persian culture

Turkish in turn affected Persian countries considerably. Throughout history, the Persian-speaking areas including Iran were ruled by a succession of Turk tribes which governed Persian culture and literature. With the exception of certain official designations within the government many of the Turkic words in Persian have a more informal shape and therefore these words don't look foreign to many Persian native speakers:

e.g. āqā 'mister', doqolu 'twin', komak 'help', toman 'official currency of Iran' , kākā 'brother', qeshlāq 'village.

Apart from Turks, Russians also occupied Iran peacefully during our Shahs' regimes when Europeans preferred to enjoy lands and resources in southern Iran and left the northern part for Russians. Naturally they also let their favorite words like ' estekan' (tea cup) into Persian.

• European influence on Persian culture

Over the past couple of centuries, Persian language has borrowed many words from European languages mainly French and English. A lot of these loanwords were originally French and use French pronunciation; also other common words mainly come from English, Italian and German as well. The table below shows some examples of common French/Persian words.

Persian French English

dush douche  shower

mersi merci thank you

gārson garçon waiter

*English vocabulary The researcher has tried to categorize the processes of word formation into two parts, simply syntactic and semantic. So far the syntactic part has remained in focus and the semantic one is put off to a later time and more analytical study. Following processes to form a word is partly common in English and Persian.

-Etymology

Know; knew; known; knowingly; unknowingly; unknown; well-known;

- Coinage

fax, radio, computer ,

- Loaning

Alcohol, fiancé,

- Compounding

Gun+ powder= gunpowder, black + board= blackboard, white + house = White House,

- Blending

Smoke+ fog=smog, breakfast + lunch = brunch

- Clipping

''Ad'' derived from advertisement, ''Prof'' from professor

-Backformation

Television/ televise, telephone/ phone

-Conversion

Master (n) = master (v), address (n) =address (v)

-Acronyms

AIDS, LASER, UNESCO

-Derivations

Box, inbox, outbox

 

* Semantic word formation

So far we've had a little focus on syntactic formation of words which is already known and clear to any linguist involved. Though we passed this short time on it, it should be emphasized that we are going to stick to semantic domains with an eye on the effects of culture and thought. To this end, the researcher took a dive in English-Persian literature to gather some supporting data and here is what he has come up with; such domains as colors, numbers, animals, address terms, object naming, measure units, flowers, stars and planets are covered. The following diagram reveals a summary of what is in focus regarding semantic domain and word formation.

 

Measure units

Our translations at issue have not cited the Persian equivalents for the measure scales in English. They are simply saying ‘18 inch and 3 foot' which could be baffling to the readers and cause them to get embarrassed often and find it hard to decode or convert into their local scales.

Units such as gram, kilogram, pint, quart, ounce, ton, piece, pile, heap, bushel, bucket, and pound are used in English to measure the weight and quantity of some materials and substances like milk, water, fish, stone etc. Persian, however, mostly makes use of gram, kilo, ton and mesqāl to weigh things. Metr, kilometr, sāntimetr and farsakh are used to measure hieght and area. Centigrade is the only scale for temperature in Persian.

A pint of milk or ounces of gold simply sound meaningless and puzzling to a Persian speaker and hard to find the equivalent in his/her language.

To measure an area or height English applies the Metric system as well as inch, foot, meter, km, furlong, cm, mm, yard, mile, acre, and so on.

When speaking of animals or people both languages use such units as cattle, swarm, gang, group, pair, colony, herd, bunch, flight (the equivalents for Persian); still, Persian has fewer terms to refer to groups of people and/or animals. Colony, herd and swarm remain weird to Persian speakers if referred to ants and bees or gang in reference to a group of people looks strange as well.

Colors and idioms

Colors play a great role in building our vocabulary system both in English and Persian. They cover a wide area and show themselves in the form of idioms, expressions and/or proverbs.

WHITE

*To show white feather ((tærsidæn), to drink white coffee( ŝir-qæhve nuŝidæn) , a white-color worker( kārmand), to go white ( ræng pæride ŝodæn), a white lie ( dorughe maslehati), as white as snow( be safidie barf), to be white-bread( pir-o- qadimi budan)

/ siāh ru/  = disgraced            /del siāh/=  fed up with sth.   / ru sæfid/ = honored                          / mu tælāyi /=  golden- haired                /mu ŝærābi  /=  hair of wine color        /mu xormāyi / = hair of date color       / ĉeŝm æsæli/= eyes of honey color

/ miŝi ĉeŝm / = sheep-like eyes

Iranians think of colors as something relative; it depends where and when to use them. Yellow and red, for instance, are a bit eyes-offending for clothes but beautiful of flowers. Green is so popular indicative of life and spirit though a green car may not look so popular. White, blue and black signify almost the same as for Americans with some exceptions. We find grey a dead color sometimes used by depressed people often.

Animals

Idioms like these "To rain cats and dogs, to make an ass of someone, as blind as bat, as dumb as fish, as cunning as fox, as greedy as wolf " indicate what the English think about some animals.

Perrine (2000:641) reports that Reid (1926) refers to cats as such:

"Dogs say cats love too much, are irresponsible,

Are changeable, marry too many wives,

Desert their children, chill all dinner tables,

With tale of their nine lives".

So they think that cats are die-hard as we think in Persian. In contrast, Persian speakers of Iran believe that rabbits are sharp and lovely animals , owls are bad-omen and pigs are dirty while the English consider rabbits stupid and timid, owls birds of fortune and pigs nice tamed animals of best meat.

Stars and planets

Anne Curzan (2003) mentioned in his book, Gender Shifts in the History of English, that planets are generally masculine. Yet, people have referred to these celestial bodies both as neutrals, males and females. Note below:

The gender of the sun in old English as reported by Perrine (2000:635):

Herrick (1591-1674)

The poet considered the sun a man saying so:

"The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun

The higher he's a getting

The sooner will his race be run

And nearer he's to setting"

The gender of the Saturn in old English:  Browning (1872-1889)

"What matter to me if their star is a world?!

Mine has opened its soul to me,

Therefore I love it."

Persian regards some well-known planets as feminine; among them are the sun, the Venus and the Saturn which are clearly attributed to naming girls. /khorshid, āftāb, Nāhid, Zohre and Zohal/ are the equivalents. Also note that we use ' zohal and Keivan/ to refer to the planet Saturn. Do we really think that Saturn might be bisexual? Clearly Persian names its girl ' Zohal' while its boy ' Keivan'.' Bahrām', translation of Mars, refers to males only.

Flowers

Various flower names are attributed to females in both English and Persian. It seems we both think of them as delicate beautiful and lovely objects which are far from being masculine.

Rose, lily, tulip, poppy, violet, narcissus, jasmine, lilac, aster and others are frequently observed within the names of girls. Equivalent Persians like /roz, nilufær, ŝæqæyeq, benæfŝe, nærges, yāsæmæn, susæn, minā/ are all found with high frequency among female names. So the contrast between English and Persian language is little as far as this domain is concerned.

 

Address terms

In Persian we address people considering their age, social status, occupations and relations:

/āqā, xānom, āqā pesær, doxtær xānom, pedær jun, mādære mæn, dāsh, ābji /

/doktor, mohændes, qorbān, jenāb særvān, jenāb ræis, sultān, ælāhæzræt/

/ kærbælāyi, hāji, mæŝdi, zāyer, hāj āqā, hāj xānom, seyed,āŝeyx /

/ bænde, hæqir, jenābāli, hæzræte āli/

/ hey, yāru, tæræf, dehāti, bæĉe, borujæk, fesqeli, juje, nim-væjæbi /

You noticed that we have different terms ranging from impolite derogatory names to normal and very polite way of addressing. In Old Persian even just few decades ago people called out or spoke about one another based on their occupation or anything they were known with. Below find a series of such terms and epithets:

/ dærviŝ dowregærd, zeynāl ŝireyi, kæmāl kæftær bāz, ækbær læsh, mæmæd sændviĉi, æbbās qæhveĉi, mæmæd mesgær, kærim se kæle, ækbær lændæhur, mohsen māstbænd, esmāil hæmāmi,

English also enjoys its various terms for calling and addressing others:

Mr. Jacob, Miss Rose, Mrs. Nilsson, Madam Kuris, Dr. Jackson,

President, Your Excellency, Your majesty, your honor, your highness

Guy , Mac, lad, pal, hey, chap, my  friend, boy

Religious terms

And God according to the poet John Donne (1572-1631) is described masculine in this way.

"So in his purple wrapped receive me Lord,

By these his thorns, give me his other crown"

The gender of God or Allah in Persian is always masculine maybe due to the direct influence of Arabic which says "Hov- Allah- ol -wahed". Religion has always granted us a lot of new words which keep changing and depend on different cultures and religions. For English and Persian languages, we refer to Islam and Christianity as the two main religions which have their special terms.

English has: temple, nun, monk, saying grace, bible, church, victimization, cross, priest, and clergyman.

Persian has: /ruzeh, masjed, tasbih, nazri, sadaqe, kheirāt, hoseinieh, rowzeh, moharam, sineh zani, takeye, zanjir zani, ka'be, ziārat, Koran/

Again it's clear that Persian enjoys many more words to offer due to being so various in religious affairs. Religious words have also entered our Persian sayings today reflecting our way of thinking sometimes:

/ ĉeŝm bæste ğeyb migi/

/bixe guŝet yāsin mixune/

/ xodā ruzito jāye dige bede/

 

Number domain

Both Persian and English take their particular attitudes toward some numbers. However, most numbers remain intact with no attention paid to them as a thought-provoking thing. Below there comes a range of numbers which carry some social thought and meaning with them:

Persian:

• 14, 5 and 40: seem sacred to most religious people; they are used in reference to Imams especially by the sect of shi'ism.
• 20: used to put others' achievements in compliment / kāret bisteh/
• 124000: believed to be the number of prophets sent by God
• 10: the borderline between pass and fail in a task- looked upon with contempt
• 1: something like 20; great and high-quality. Besides, God is one only and so Persian speakers mostly believe a good thing should be only one. / khodā yaki, zan yaki/
• 3: this number shows okay / tā 3 nashe bāzi nashe/ or again we attribute 3 to a religious belief saying / Allah, Mohammad, Ali/- meaning that the third time is done.
• 13: indicative of bad-omen and people are afraid of

English:

• 10: very good with high quality (an ace)
• 7 is usually regarded as lucky/auspicious, that probably survives from various bits of classical (Roman/Greek) culture. Also we know about 7 Heavens.
• 666 is a number considered evil in the bible (the number of "the beast")
• 13 is considered unlucky as 13 people sat down at Christ's last supper
• 3 : again it's considered a number of luck / third time lucky/
• 1: God , a respected number
• 6: days to build the heavens and earth
• 50,000 years, the time of judgment day

 

Discussions

 Color terms discussed by Yarmohamadi (2002) proved to be worth studying anew. This researcher came to the same results that the domain of colors contributes highly to forming new words, expressions and idioms. It should be added that many colors brought in English idioms are transferred into another color in Persian to signify the same thing- still they share similar color names in some compound expressions. Lack of isomorphism arisen from using different colors to say the same thing in English and Persian provides the field for EFL learners to commit errors. Having two different systems of measurements in the language also puts the translators and interpreters into trouble when try to convey a precise message. Measure units were analyzed by this researcher instead of Yarmohamadi's measure terms. It was found that English is using metric and non-metric systems for measuring height and distance while Persian majorly sticks to the metric system.

Lack of adequate words in a language showed to bear influence on the perception of people of that language. In reference to trees, for instance, the word æfra/maple/ remains weird to southern people of Iran while northern residents have little conception over konar / lotus/ which grows up in the south only. Simply each group has little idea about how the other one's tree looks like for they can't see it in their environment. Then the frequency of their reference to the other tree is also low. Another example is that residents of hot and moist areas in southern Iran cannot perceive well how avalanche looks like exactly. They have not seen enough snow most probably. This is nearly in line with the findings by Lantz (1963), Brown and Lenneberg (1954) who conducted a pertinent study and concluded that language does not affect perception. If they perceive a phenomenon in the environment, they find a word in their language and go toward naming and categorizing it.

Barrette (1989) reported an article which claimed that the Hebrews of Biblical times would think differently from westerns of Hellenistic era. It should be clarified here that Iranians because of reliance on God's will power and religious beliefs, as a main factor shaping their thought, step almost in the same way as Hebrews. They mostly think that God rules the whole nature and happening with a little role played by human being; the Hebrew had been found of the notion that God does everything with nothing left to be done by man.

Martinez and Shatz (1996) had examined Spanish and English children to find about the gender marking in the two languages via categorization. As gender is so limited in English, the children didn't care about it while doing their classification. On the other hand, Spanish children showed sensitivity to this point and took it into account. In case of Persian, children are expected to do the same as the English because gender marking has little place in Persian as well. The two linguists considered this point in favor of Whorfian hypothesis since each language imparts a way of thinking. This researcher agrees partly with them in this case for such a kind of categorization of objects is to some extent language-specific. Yet, it should be clarified that children of Spanish, German, and French etc. which are gender-sensitive are expected to think in similar ways and those of other neutral languages like Persian and English should think and behave the same.

Lucy (1992) tried to find about plural forming in English and Yucatan of Mexico. He found out that English speakers indicate number for animate/inanimate objects while Yucatan speakers used number frequently for animals and less for non-animate objects. In Persian as in English, we indicate number or a measure unit for both animate and inanimate things. So, different languages may use a grammatical point in similar ways. It should be noted of course that animate objects are not the same in English and Persian. Little children of Iran mostly consider plants and moving things as animate beings while it may not hold true in case of British or American children.  Lucy also pointed out that distinct objects like chair and candle are countable and considered singular in English and could be pluralized while air and water do not take plural forms. He understood that Japanese take all inanimate beings as mass nouns in English. This researcher, however, found that Persian and English think almost the same in this regard.

6.conclusion

In reply to the first question concerning the effect of thought on word formation , it can be mentioned that one's thinking style can help one select a proper word in reference to an object or substance; there may exist many words related to something but his thinking style lets him choose the correct one. For example, while talking about stars and planets, it is thought which compels Persian speakers to call the sun a beautiful lady and reminds the English to consider it a powerful man.

Regarding the second question or the role played by culture in word formation, the findings indicated that culture along with its branches including environment, literature, religion and family contribute highly to raising a new thinking style and forming new words in a language. One's specific region of living consists of specific creatures, trees and objects, enjoys its special customs and habits which require their special names and categorizations. Literary men including poets, writers and translators play with existing words to make similes, metaphors, personifications and change them according to their skills to convey an idea. They also go to coin words or import them from other languages with little hesitation.Religion as one other major part of the culture granted both languages a new set of words. Depending on the type of religion a culture adopted, that society changed relevant vocabulary cache and coined or borrowed a replacement. Persian, for instance, was deeply affected hundreds of years ago when Arabs invaded Iran.

The answer to the last question about the way word formation varies in English and Persian requires a retrospect to the processes involved. It was found that the two languages overlap greatly in such processes as compounding, coining, borrowing and etymology. Other processes like blending and backformation are rarely observed in Persian while Persian, on the other hand, uses repetition specifically to make a new word. Besides, compounding is also more common in Persian than English. Acronyms and nominal couples exist in both, except that acronyms are seen to be more utilized in military names and the names of companies. NASA and NATO in English and rājā and nājā in Persian are few common examples.

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About the Author

co-authors:Professor Yarmohamadi.L & Dr.Rashidi.N from Shiraz University, Iran.