Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to re: Sticking my neck out

I actually used both
Gary — (archived)

Iranian student said:

>So Gary in Farsi would be correctly گری and probably arabs
>will wrongly translate it as جری which actually sounds like
>"Jerry" or "Jary" and not "Gary"

I actually started out using جری because I wanted to be "pure". Then later on I said "to hell with purity" and went to گری . My Russian grandmother (who always wanted me to learn Russian) was very intrigued by my quixotic attempt to learn Arabic. However she often remarked about the beauty of Arabic script (I think Cyrillic looks cool and ultra-modern but can only read a few words). Truth-to-tell I should have spent my time learning German. After I left university, I went to work in Germany and had to learn German at night school (die Volks Hoch Schule). Most of my classmates were Iranians who had recently fled from Khomeini and the hideous Iran-Iraq War). After I got through that process almost all of my Arabic had been over-written. Now whenever I try to fish up an Arab word, I end up with something in German.

Gary or جری or better yet گری

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