Examination of Examples of Persian Equivalents Approved by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature to Illustrate the Underlying Principles

This article examines a number of preferred words approved by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature (hereafter called the
Third Academy) despite the presence of widely-used counterparts. The article strives to provide explanations for such instances as the rejection by the Third Academy of the Tajiki /čarxbāl/ for the English [helicopter], on the grounds that it is structurally ambiguous, to opt for /bālgard/; replacement of /tārnamā/ [website], on the grounds that it is semantically inadequate, with /vebgāh/, in which the English [web] is borrowed into Persian and used in a word-cluster derived from it; preference of /porčarbī/ [fatty], due to its more common and frequent structure, over /porčarb/; selection of /dūrnegār/ [facsimile] preferred to /namābar/ for its greater semantic flexibility due to the syntactic relations between its constituents (i.e., /dūr/ [far] and /negār/ [scribe/ scriber]; the stringent rejection of the word-for-word translation /xodzendegīnāme/ for [autobiography] in favor of /zendegīnāme-ye xodnevešt/; selection of the less familiar /šodāmad/ [exchange of visits; traffic] at the expense of the more common /raftoāmad/; or, the simple /šomār/, generally meaning [number], selected as the equivalent for ‘tirage’ (<fr.) [circulation for periodicals or publications] to avoid the suffix /-gān/ that has been used in a specific sense in other cases. These explanations are meant to illustrate how the word selection principles and guidelines adopted by the Academy work in practice.