Steele on Ahmadinejad: Of Arenas of Time and Intransitive Verbs
Jonathan Steele of the Guardian does a good piece about the controversy over Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's quotation from Khomeini that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time" -- which some Iranian activists and the Western press translated as "Israel must be wiped off the face of the map."
The only thing I would add is that mahv shodan is in fact an intransitive verb construction. Shodan is to become. An mard khoshhal shodeh is "that man became happy." It is not a transitive verb. That is why mahv shodan is better translated "vanish," also an intransitive verb. The transitive is mahv kardan, to "wipe out" or "eliminate."
The New York Times was told by supposed Persian language experts in Iran, and appears to believe, that mahv shodan is a transitive verb construct. It makes me a little worried about the state of grammar in Iran, and in the Persian speaking staff of the NYT, and also about its newsgathering prowess. If they cannot find out that shodan is intransitive, something well known in Persian grammar for thousands of years, you wonder what other assertions they are swallowing. I told them this, by the way, before the article came out. I guess we academic Persianists are not trusted to know an intransitive verb when we see one. No wonder we're mostly not trusted to know more important things.
posted by Juan Cole @ 6/15/2006 12:24:00 AM
9 Comments:
The fact that you and others with expertise in a given area are ignored is no doubt due in part to the influence of the monied alumni of your institutions, as William O. Beeman pointed our in the piece you posted a few days ago. He also blamed those in charge at your institutions for their lily-livered reaction to the pressure exerted by those, like Campus Watch, who act to suppress academic freedom. Each reacts :
The better not to run afoul of its more vocal and ideologically driven alumni and trustees, who believe along with Bill O'Reilly that all knowledge is just opinion anyway, so why not just tell the professoriate what they should be teaching, and what positions they should be espousing?
But the surprising point is that you seem surprised at the NYTimes role as a purveyor of opinion masked as fact. They have been in that business for a very, very long time. The remarkable point is, after their Pullitzer Prize performance for framing Wen Ho Lee and for the yellow journalism leading up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, that there are still people who take seriously what is written in the NYTimes.
Even if the Iranian President had stated categorically his intention to attack and destroy Israel forthwith, this would not alter the fact that Iran presents no existential military threat to Israel whatsoever.
Iran has a substandard military with ageing, decrepit hardware and no nuclear weapons. Israel is a regional military superpower with state of the art weaponry and an estimated 200 nuclear warheads. Any conflict between the two would be over in pretty short order.
And that's ignoring the fact that Israel is umbilically linked to the greatest military superpower the world has ever seen, which has a military presence encircling Iran in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan and the Gulf, along with an apocalypse-inviting nuclear capability.
Even if Iran managed to cobble together some sort of nuclear device in the next few years, to use it would be to guarantee its destruction.
Recall that the only legitimate act of violence is one of self defence, and the idea that Israel, let alone the US, needs to defend itself against Iran is patently absurd. Yet the political classes continue to soberly discuss the serious threat posed by a nuclear armed Iran, when its President has issued the terrifying threat to "wipe Israel from the map", see it vanish from the page of time, or whatever it was that he said. Meanwhile , Israel’s successful wiping of Palestine from the map and its ongoing attempts to keep it off the map, are backed to the hilt by Washington and London.
David Wearing
London, UK
Yes, academics are the last place the Bushiites look for knowledge...
Unless, of course, you're an academic who drinks their Kool-Aid - THEN you are the fountain of wisdom...
After all, who better to inspire a generation of war mongerers than college professors?
The comments following the article are also of interest as many readers feel that things such as transitive and intransitive are really quibbles as Iran's intent is to wipe Israel from the face of the earth. Others feel that quoting Dr Cole automatically renders any alternative interpretions incorrect, while many seem to want to argue that the "intent" of the speaker and not the actual words are the crux of the matter.
It appears that not only are Orientalists well entrenched in many departments, but it seems they intend to make their arguments for war against Iran regardless of what was really said. One reader kept reiterating he did not see the difference between vanish and wiped or the difference between saying the regime in control of Israel or Israel itself. In light of this level of discourse, it seems we will never be able to discern what is really, really meant, as our own officials frequently engage in bombastic excess. Are all their statements now understood to be literal?
"The New York Times was told by supposed Persian language experts in Iran, and appears to believe, that mahv shodan is a transitive verb construct. It makes me a little worried about the state of grammar in Iran, and in the Persian speaking staff of the NYT, and also about its newsgathering prowess. If they cannot find out that shodan is intransitive, something well known in Persian grammar for thousands of years, you wonder what other assertions they are swallowing. I told them this, by the way, before the article came out. I guess we academic Persianists are not trusted to know an intransitive verb when we see one. No wonder we're mostly not trusted to know more important things."
Dr. Cole,
Nice satire, btw, but it is probably intentional, this misunderstanding. Just for laughs, I pasted recent essays by different, well known, neo-con type opionists into Word, analyzed each sentence line by line, and hyperlinked to explanations of the faulty thinking in each. Wikipedia has a nice selection of articles on various logical fallacies.
My point is that these articles consist of almost nothing but logical fallacies. In this environment, intentionally getting a translation wrong is like flicking a cigarette butt onto the sidewalk after the bank has been robbed.
The consequence is much worse, of course. Neo-cons want to use American troops and American equipment to murder Iranian women, children, and soldiers, on the pretext of protecting the world (Israel) from non-existent nuclear warheads.
The New York Times frequently gets English grammar wrong, so I'm not surprised they screw up Farsi/Persian.
I've seen the NYTimes confuse adjectives and adverbs and misplace modifiers. Not to mention their headlines that contradict the story below.
In his article in the NYT Mr. Bronner first painstakingly establishes that the Ahmadinejad's phrase did not contain the word "Israel" but the "occupying regime" and did not contain the word "map" but the "page of time" and then bizarrily concludes, "So did Iran's president call for Israel to be wiped off the map? It certainly seems so." Is there some disease of the logical faculties raging at the NYT?
11/03/2007+++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Headlone in
JPost.com » Middle East » Article
Nov 2, 2007 10:30 | Updated Nov 2, 2007 19:20
'USAF struck Syrian nuclear site" ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++ The September 6 raid over Syria was carried out by the US Air Force, the Al-Jazeera Web site reported Friday. The Web site quoted Israeli and Arab sources as saying that two US jets armed with tactical nuclear weapons carried out an attack on a suspected nuclear site under construction.
A US Air Force F-22 Raptor, an F-117 Nighthawk, an F-4 Phantom and an F-15 Eagle fly over Holloman Air Force Base, N.M.
Photo: US Air Force
The sources were quoted as saying that Israeli F-15 and F-16 jets provided cover for the US planes.
The sources added that each US plane carried one tactical nuclear weapon and that the site was hit by one bomb and was totally destroyed.
At the beginning of October, Israel's military censor began to allow the local media to report on the raid without attributing their report to foreign sources. Nevertheless, details of the strike have remained clouded in mystery.
RELATED
* Alleged Syrian atomic reactor 'vanishes'
* 'Syria was preparing for Israeli attack'
On October 28, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the cabinet that he had apologized to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan if Israel violated Turkish airspace during a strike on an alleged nuclear facility in Syria last month.
In a carefully worded statement that was given to reporters after the cabinet meeting, Olmert said: "In my conversation with the Turkish prime minister, I told him that if Israeli planes indeed penetrated Turkish airspace, then there was no intention thereby, either in advance or in any case, to - in any way - violate or undermine Turkish sovereignty, which we respect."
The New York Times reported on October 13 that Israeli planes struck at what US and Israeli intelligence believed was a partly constructed nuclear reactor in Syria on September 6, citing American and foreign officials who had seen the relevant intelligence reports.
According to the report, Israel carried out the report to send a message that it would not tolerate even a nuclear program in its initial stages of construction in any neighboring state.
On October 17, Syria denied that one of its representatives to the United Nations told a panel that an Israeli air strike hit a Syrian nuclear facility and added that "such facilities do not exist in Syria."
A UN document released by the press office had provided an account of a meeting of the First Committee, Disarmament and International Security, in New York, and paraphrased an unnamed Syrian representative as saying that a nuclear facility was hit by the raid.
However, the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency, SANA said media reports, apparently based on a UN press release, misquoted the Syrian diplomat.++++++++++++++++++++++++++
In light of the aforementioned circumlocution, What is one to make of this article??? tgw@sacbeemail.com
Well done and thank you for your post. I have sent it to my MEP, Gerard Batten, who insisted that the "wipe-off the map" comment from Iran's president was the reason Israel must have and keep nuclear weapons and the rest of the Middle East must not. His racist and one-sided fascistic view came as a response to my questioning why the EU recently blocked a call from Egypt for a nuclear free Middle East -- Mr Batten stated that the ME cannot have that as Israel needs her nuclear weapons.
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