Farsi of the day

Today, my inner language fan and my inner Star Wars fan connected, and it was a beautiful thing. I'm still absolutely dancing with delight over here.

It all started when I was reading Zahn's Heir to the Empire over lunch yesterday. I was thinking about Khabarakh and the Noghri, and it dawned on me that the Noghri language was a lot like Farsi--a lot like Farsi. It used all the same sounds, and as far as I could tell, no other sounds. One could comfortably write it out with Farsi characters.

Come to find out in this interview, Noghri really does come from the Farsi "noghre," which is "silver." According to various sources, including the online dictionary, the lethal legendary bird we call a "roc" is, in Farsi, a "rukh." Rukh is Grand Admiral Thrawn's bodyguard who finally kills him. And as for Khabarakh, the first Noghri that Princess Leia meets, "Khabar" is "news." I haven't been able to confirm that Zahn did any of these on purpose (except for "Noghri" itself), but it strikes me as very plausible. :-D

One discrepancy, or at least place Zahn didn't follow Farsi exactly, is in the Noghri word "Matrakh," which is "matriarch." Farsi has "mother" as "mader." I can't remember any other Noghri vocab to track down, since I'm still in Heir to the Empire and haven't read the other two for several years, but still--this is cool enough to go on with.

Addendum: In Zahn's Spinneret, written in 1987, six years after Heir to the Empire, there's a place where the linguist tentatively identifies someone else's accent as from a dialect of Farsi.