Monday, November 05, 2007

Farsi of the day


Here I've been, working away at memorizing the words for "tasty" and "nasty-tasting," when the obvious struck me.
Both words share "maze." The other half is "khosh," which means "good," and "bad," meaning, predictably, "bad."
Now, "maze" here means "tasty." But "maze" is a lot like "maize," which is corn; and corn used to have a much broader meaning, and be used for any sort of grain, and by extension to mean any sort of food.
Khoshmaze: good food: tasty. Badmaze: bad food: nasty-tasting. Perhaps it's not quite that obvious, but it did make sense, and also made me happy. :-)

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