Taʿârof, the ceremony of courtesy

Re:Taʿârof, the ceremony of courtesy by benbreen on Friday December 04, 2015 @08:47PM (#10680433)

I've been trying to learn Farsi lately and keep getting struck by the large number of French loanwords. Including at least one that goes back to time of the Crusades - my wife's Iranian and she always calls me a "Firangi," which basically just mean "Westerner" now, but is a transliteration of "Frank." Apparently it also ended up becoming the name for an Indianized variant on the medieval European broadsword:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firangi_(sword)

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Re:Taʿârof, the ceremony of courtesy by Texasian on Friday December 04, 2015 @08:58PM (#10680456)

Oh wow, thats crazy interesting... There's a beach area on Penang in Malaysia called Batu Ferringhi. It means Foreigner's Rock.

I guess the loan word spread throughout the muslim world somehow...

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Re:Taʿârof, the ceremony of courtesy by benbreen on Friday December 04, 2015 @09:05PM (#10680480)

Amazingly, it even made its way into Chinese as folangji (佛郎機):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farang#Etymology_and_related_w...

Sort of reminds me of an anecdote I read somewhere in a book about medieval fashion - one theory is that those curvy-toed shoes you see in late medieval artwork originated in Tang dynasty China, and the fashion took ~500 years to slowly make its way west across Eurasia.

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Re:Taʿârof, the ceremony of courtesy by Natsu on Friday December 04, 2015 @09:39PM (#10680559)

Now you have me wondering if it could possibly be the inspiration for the name of the Ferengi.

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Re:Taʿârof, the ceremony of courtesy by ekianjo on Friday December 04, 2015 @09:10PM (#10680488)

Your link also mentions the word is used in Thai as Farang as well.

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Re:Taʿârof, the ceremony of courtesy by uptownfunk on Friday December 04, 2015 @09:31PM (#10680541)

It's also in Hindi as Firangi as well.

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Re:Taʿârof, the ceremony of courtesy by ekianjo on Friday December 04, 2015 @09:03PM (#10680469)

Wow, really cool! Words are without borders.

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Re:Taʿârof, the ceremony of courtesy by partomniscient on Friday December 04, 2015 @10:15PM (#10680642)

Information wants to be free.

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Re:Taʿârof, the ceremony of courtesy by rezashirazian on Friday December 04, 2015 @09:25PM (#10680527)

It is actually much simplier than that. The word you're speaking of is "Farangi" which is Farsi for foreigner.

Farsi is an indo-european language so beside loan words which infiltrated the language during Reza Shah's moderinization of Iran, many of them actually share the same root as other Indo-European languages like English, French or German.

Farangi is one of those words. It is not a borrowed word

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Re:Taʿârof, the ceremony of courtesy by PopePompous on Friday December 04, 2015 @10:11PM (#10680631)

Farsi has plenty of cognates with English too. My favorite is "Behtar" which means better. The nice twist is that "Beh" means good, so "Behtar" literally means "gooder". English, or some earlier language that became English, probably had a word like "beh" which meant good. But we lost that word, but kept better. Farsi still has both words.

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Re:Taʿârof, the ceremony of courtesy by malekpour on Saturday December 05, 2015 @02:45AM (#10681223)

Surprisingly, some essential or very common English words came from Persian including: Check, Magic, Rank, Path, Orange, Peach, Lemon, Candy, Sugar, Caravan, Bronze, Chess, Jackal, Kiosk, Mummy, Paradise...

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Re:Taʿârof, the ceremony of courtesy by ukz on Saturday December 05, 2015 @12:42AM (#10681022)

'Pirang' in Bahasa Indonesia describes physical trait of Europeans i.e. hair colour.

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