This study identifies and compares the language learning strategies and beliefs about language learning of 166 university students learning Persian (Farsi), a strategic less commonly taught language. The data were collected from three settings in the United States; the University of California at Berkeley (UCB), the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), and the University of Texas at Austin (UT), using three questionnaires: the Individual Background Questionnaire (IBQ), the Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory (BALLI), and the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL). In descriptive analyses of the BALLI, results showed that participants reported holding strong beliefs in the categories of "motivation and expectation" and "foreign language aptitude". A good number of the participants also reported strong beliefs about the importance of learning Persian and strong motivations for learning Persian, particularly to get to know native speakers of Persian better. Descriptive analyses of the SILL showed that participants reported using compensation and social strategies most, followed by cognitive, metacognitive, memory, and affective strategies. On the other hand, students reported less frequent use of memory and affective strategies. This higher use of language learning strategies, as well as stronger beliefs about language learning held by students of Persian, likely corresponds to the number of heritage learners and is an indication of a potential existing association. In short, the results of this study provide empirical description of the language learning beliefs and strategies in learners of Persian, a previously unstudied group of language learners. The study concludes with a list of practical implications for Persian instruction.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Vanderbilt University, 1910.

No description available.

During the early-modern period, Persian was the language of the imperial court and a prestigious literary medium in South Asia. Not only did Persian connect the Subcontinent with intellectual and cultural trends across western and central Asia, but during the early-modern period, India--even compared with Iran--was arguably the world's main center for the patronage of Persian literature and scholarship. However, our understanding of the societal role of Indo-Persian (that is, Persian used in South Asia) is still hazy in part because the end of Persian as a language of power in India has been so historiographically over-determined. Colonial intellectuals and nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalists in Iran and India have claimed that by the eighteenth century Indo-Persian had become an artificial, ossified tradition in decline, symptomatic of a political system in decline, whose ineluctable destiny was to be replaced by supposedly more democratic and properly Indian languages like Hindi and Urdu. The present study seeks to nuance and in some cases to completely revise this declinist narrative through an examination of eighteenth-century primary sources. This dissertation traces the development of philology (the study of literary language, known in Persian under several names including 'ilm-i lughat) within the Indo-Persian tradition, concentrating on its social and political ramifications, and the modes by which Indo-Persian writers smoothed the way for the adoption of the vernacular in contexts formerly reserved for Persian. The eighteenth century is a hinge between the pre-modern and the colonial modern, and yet our understanding of the intellectual history of that century is much poorer than for the colonial period. The most prolific and arguably most influential Indo-Persian philologist of the early-modern period was Siraj al-Din 'Ali Khan (1687/8-1756), whose nom de plume was Arzu. Besides being a much-admired poet in Persian and Urdu, Arzu was a rigorous theoretician of language. Arzu's conception of language accounted for literary innovation and historical change, a project whose newness he acknowledges and which was necessary in the face of the tazah go'i [literally, "fresh speaking"] movement in Persian literature. Although later scholarship has tended to frame this debate in anachronistically nationalist terms (Iranians versus Indians), the primary sources complicate the picture. The present study draws an analogy to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in Europe to show that the contemporary concern had far less to do with geography than with the question of how to interpret innovative "fresh speaking" poetry (just as in Europe the concern had been over assessing the value of texts not modeled on the Classics). Arzu used historical reasoning to argue that as a cosmopolitan language Persian could not be the property of one nation and be subject to one narrow kind of interpretation. In doing so he carefully defined the differences in usage within the Persian cosmopolis, and concluded that Indo-Persian usage was within the norms of Persian usage generally, meaning that properly educated Indians had as much right as Iranian native speakers to innovate in Persian. An intervention offered by the present research is the recognition that Arzu's theories, which superficially seem to concern only Persian, apply to language more generally. A study of his work can therefore elucidate the mechanisms that allowed Urdu to gain acceptance in elite literary circles in northern India during his lifetime. An often-overlooked aspect of intellectual history, both in India and in the West, is that advances in vernacular literary culture have usually come about not through a repudiation of the classics and their language but rather through a sustained engagement with them by bilingual writers. By changing attitudes about rekhtah, a Persianized form of vernacular composition that would later be renamed and reconceptualized as Urdu, Arzu defined and systematized vernacular literary production. Furthermore, this study presents a challenge to the persistent misconception that Indians started writing Urdu because they were ashamed of their poor Persian.

Amendments pasted on front end paper. / Bibliography: leaves 333-355. / viii, 355 leaves : ill., maps ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Studies the changes in the language of commercial press advertising found before 1979 (the year of the Islamic Revolution in Iran) and after 1990. Investigating their varying effects on sociolinguistic norms, and to relate the changes to external factors in the ideology and social history of Iran. Also addresses the wider issue of the relation between language and ideology in different kinds of societies, in particular islamic societies. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of European Studies, 1998?

Amendments pasted on front end paper. / Bibliography: leaves 333-355. / viii, 355 leaves : ill., maps ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Studies the changes in the language of commercial press advertising found before 1979 (the year of the Islamic Revolution in Iran) and after 1990. Investigating their varying effects on sociolinguistic norms, and to relate the changes to external factors in the ideology and social history of Iran. Also addresses the wider issue of the relation between language and ideology in different kinds of societies, in particular islamic societies. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of European Studies, 1998?

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Georgetown University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Name matching plays a vital and crucial role in many applications. They are for example used in information retrieval or deduplication systems to do comparisons among names to match them together or to find the names that refer to identical objects, persons, or companies. Since names in each application are subject to variations and errors that are unavoidable in any system and because of the importance of name matching, so far many algorithms have been developed to handle matching of names. These algorithms consider the name variations that may happen because of spelling, pattern or phonetic modifications. However most existing methods were developed for use with the English language and so cover the characteristics of this language. Up to now no specific one has been designed and implemented for the Persian language. The purpose of this thesis is to present a name matching algorithm for Persian. In this project, after consideration of all major algorithms in this area, we selected one of the basic methods for name matching that we then expanded to make it work particularly well for Persian names. This proposed algorithm, called Persian Edit Distance Algorithm or shortly PEDA, was built based on the characteristics of the Persian language and it compares Persian names with each other on three levels: phonetic similarity, character form similarity and keyboard distance, in order to give more accurate results for Persian names. The algorithm gets Persian names as its input and determines their similarity as a percentage in the output. In this thesis three series of experiments have been accomplished in order to evaluate the proposed algorithm. The f-measure average shows a value of 0.86 for the first series and a value of 0.80 for the second series results. The first series of experiments have been repeated with Levenshtein as well, and have 33.9% false negatives on average while PEDA has a false negative average of 6.4%. The third series of experiments shows that PEDA works well for one edit, two edits and three edits with true positive average values of 99%, 81%, and 69% respectively.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, 1997. / Bibliography: leaves 146-159.