About Name-ye Farhangestan

Name-ye Farhangestan

Overview

Name-ye Farhangestan (Persian: نامه فرهنگستان; Nāma-ye Farhangestān, "Writings of the Academy") was a Persian-language magazine published in Tehran, Iran, as the publication organ of Iran's Academy — the Farhangestan. It was first published monthly between 1943 and 1947, during which ten issues appeared, and it was resumed under the same name by the third Farhangestan as a quarterly from 1995. Devoted to the Persian language and to the Academy's work on language and literature, it became an important pioneer for linguistic research and language reform in the Pahlavi era, used in particular to publish the Persian equivalents the Academy adopted to replace foreign words. The magazine's two lives, separated by nearly half a century, mirror the interrupted institutional history of the Academy itself.

The Academy of Iran and Its Mission

The magazine's publisher was the Academy of Iran (Farhangestan-e Iran), founded on 20 May 1935 by the initiative of Reza Shah, the first shah of the Pahlavi dynasty, mainly through the efforts of Mohammad Ali Foroughi and Hekmat Shirazi. The Academy, headquartered in Tehran, acted as the official authority on the Persian language; its primary objective was to preserve and protect Persian, and in particular to remove Arabic and French words from the language and replace them with suitable Persian alternatives, standardising usage and spelling. It was modelled in part on Ataturk's Turkish Language Association, founded in 1932, and its creation followed Reza Shah's 1934 order to rebuild Ferdowsi's tomb and the Ferdowsi Millenary Celebration in Mashhad, marking a thousand years of Persian literature since Ferdowsi. Its founding members were among the most memorable literary figures and celebrated scholars of the day, including Ali Akbar Dehkhoda, author of the most important and comprehensive dictionary of Persian language and literature, Abbas Eqbal Ashtiani, founder of the magazine Yadegar, Abdolazim Gharib, Ahmad Matin-Daftari, Ali Akbar Siyasi, Ali Asghar Hekmat, Badiozzaman Forouzanfar, Ebrahim Poordavood and Homayun Foruzanfar. An institution with that membership and that mandate required a journal, and Name-ye Farhangestan became it.

First Series, 1943 to 1947

The Farhangestan started its monthly journal, Nama-ye Farhangestan, in 1322 Š./1943, according to Encyclopaedia Iranica's article on the Farhangestan. Only ten issues were published between that year and 1326 Š./1947, in what the magazine's reference entry counts as five volumes. The journal appeared under the presidency succession of the Academy's later years: Forughi had resumed the presidency in the winter of 1941–42, shortly after Reza Shah's abdication, and five new members — Sayyed Mohammad Tadayyon, Masud Kayhan, Ahmad Bahmanyar, Jalal-al-Din Homa'i and Gholam-Ali Ra'di Azarakhshi — were added after several regular members had passed away. After Forughi's death in 1942, Sami'i succeeded to the presidency. Within that setting, the magazine served as the Academy's public record: the channel through which its decisions, its research and its adopted vocabulary reached teachers, officials, writers and readers across Iran.

Publishing Persian Equivalents

The Academy, whose primary objective was to preserve and protect the Persian language, used the journal in particular for publishing Persian equivalents to replace certain foreign words. This was the practical heart of Name-ye Farhangestan's first series. Under Reza Shah the use of the Academy's newly coined terms was mandatory, and deviation from them could be treated as a legal offence, so the lists printed in the Academy's organ had direct consequences for schools, government offices and the press. The journal therefore functioned as an instrument of language planning as much as a magazine: its pages announced which foreign words were to be abandoned and which Persian words were to take their place. In addition, the Farhangestan published lists of its adopted words at the end of each year, and it commissioned reference works alongside the journal — a Persian dictionary to be compiled by Sa'id Nafisi and an Arabic-Persian dictionary to be compiled by Foruzanfar, of which only the first volume of each was published, in 1941–42. The magazine's reference entry accordingly describes it as an important pioneer for linguistic research and language reforms in the Pahlavi era.

The Purification Debate

The programme that Name-ye Farhangestan publicised was controversial from the start, and the journal's history cannot be understood apart from that debate. Encyclopaedia Iranica's assessment records that the absence of precise methods and criteria, disregard for the history and structure of Persian, and the excessive speed with which decisions were made led to some questionable choices: the proposed term daneš-nama for a university diploma ignored the word's old meaning of encyclopedia; aškub, proposed for a storey in a building, was of Aramaic rather than Persian extraction; amuzgar was specified for an elementary school teacher alongside dabir for a high school teacher and ostad for a university professor, leaving no general word for teacher; and dabir, an obsolete word meaning scribe or secretary, was adopted both for a secretary and for a high school teacher, with sar-dabir for editor-in-chief, creating needless confusion. Within weeks of Reza Shah's abdication in September 1941, the minister of education, Sadiq, gave teachers and textbook writers the choice of using either the old or the new terms, since the new scientific terminology was causing problems; this calmed the teachers, and authors did not use the new terms in their later writings. Abbas Eqbal, a founding and permanent member of the Academy who considered his membership compulsory and opposed its activities, published his critiques of the Academy's word-formation in his own magazine Yadgar after the Shah's fall, arguing that purification had impoverished the language. Name-ye Farhangestan thus stood at the centre of a national argument conducted, fittingly, through rival magazines.

End of the First Series

The first series of Name-ye Farhangestan ended in 1947 after ten issues. The Academy itself was entering decline: after Sami'i's death in 1332 Š./1954 no successor as president was appointed, and the Farhangestan practically ceased to function. The journal's short run of ten issues across four years reflected both the Academy's slowing activity after 1941 — when enforcement of its terminology became optional and its political backing weakened — and the general fragility of institutional publishing in the period. For nearly fifty years the title survived only in library collections, as the documentary record of the first Academy's attempt to remake the Persian vocabulary by decree.

Interim: The Academy Idea after 1947

Although the magazine ceased, the ideal behind it — an official academy guarding the Persian language — did not disappear from Iranian public life. The first Academy's work had established the precedent that the state could legislate vocabulary, that a body of scholars should coin Persian equivalents for foreign and technical terms, and that such decisions should be published systematically. Its excesses had equally established the counter-arguments, voiced by Eqbal and others, that coinages drawn from Old Persian and long out of use rendered the language obscure and artificial. Later Iranian language planning inherited both the precedent and the critique. When a new Academy of Persian Language and Literature — the third Farhangestan — was established as the regulatory body for Persian, headquartered in Tehran, it revived not only the institution's functions of linguistic research on Persian and other Iranian languages but also its journal, under the same title.

Revival from 1995

A quarterly journal with the same name, Name-ye Farhangestan, began to be published again by the third Farhangestan in spring 1995, as Encyclopaedia Iranica records. The magazine's modern reference entry likewise states that the magazine was first published between 1943 and 1947 and continued in 1995 to the present, published by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature in Tehran. The revived journal resumed the original's defining task — the Academy also published lists of its adopted words — within a very different linguistic landscape, in which the challenge was less the French vocabulary of the 1930s than the global terminology of science and technology. The continuity of title was deliberate: the quarterly presented itself as the same organ of the same mission, restored after the long dormancy of the Academy idea, and its appearance completed a publishing history that had begun in 1943.

Significance for Linguistic Research

Name-ye Farhangestan matters to the history of the Persian language out of proportion to its ten first-series issues. It was the printed instrument of the first systematic, state-backed programme of Persian language planning, and its lists of equivalents are primary evidence for how that programme worked: which words were targeted, what replaced them, and how scholars of the calibre of Dehkhoda and Forouzanfar reasoned about their language. Its pages also preserve the institutional self-understanding of the Farhangestan at the height of Pahlavi cultural nationalism, an era shaped by the Ferdowsi millenary and by the ambition to make Persian a fully modern language of state, school and science. That the programme's methods drew criticism from within the Academy itself, and that those criticisms were printed in a rival scholarly monthly, makes the journal part of a documented debate that historians of language planning in Iran continue to study.

Publication Facts

Name-ye Farhangestan was a Persian-language magazine published in Tehran, Iran, by the Academy of Iran and, in its revived form, by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature. It was categorised under literature and linguistics. The first series was monthly: ten issues, in five volumes, appeared between 1943 and 1947. The journal was resumed as a quarterly under the same name by the third Farhangestan from spring 1995. Its subject was the Persian language and the Academy's work on language and literature, above all the publication of Persian equivalents adopted to replace foreign words. The magazine is documented in Encyclopaedia Iranica's article on the Farhangestan and in reference entries on the magazine itself, from which its dates, issue counts and publishing history are drawn.