This week as I was sitting in traffic and passing the time trying to figure out the intended meaning of other cars' customized license plates, I had a light-bulb moment: (Drum roll) reading customized license plates is not too different from reading Farsi (and Arabic).Apart from being an all together different alphabet, Farsi grammar rules and sentence structures are so different from English that usually when I try to explain the difference to people, their eyes glaze over and the conversation ends fairly quickly.
So, for those of you who also tailgate cars to try to read and figure out the meaning of their customized plates, here are some ways reading Farsi and customized license plates are similar:
- Spacing between words is optional
- Vowels are almost always omitted
- Minimal, if any, punctuation
- No distinction between upper and lower case letter
This partly explains why each day, after five hours of Farsi classes, I head to the medicine cabinet and reach for the bottle of Tylenol.
1 comment:
Ahh!! That sounds terrible!!!
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