Audio-Books.com.au

Tagalog is one of the major languages of the Republic of the Philippines. It is the most spoken Philippine language in terms of the number of speakers. Tagalog, as its de facto standardized counterpart, Filipino, is the principal language of the national media in the Philippines. It is the primary language of public education. As Filipino, it is, along with English, a co-official language and the sole national language. Tagalog is widely used as a lingua franca throughout the country, and in overseas Filipino communities. However, while Tagalog may be prevalent in those fields, English, to varying degrees of fluency, is more prevalent in the fields of government and business. Tagalog History The word Tagalog derived from tagá-ílog, from tagá- meaning "native of" and ílog meaning "river", thus, it means "river dweller." There are no surviving written samples of Tagalog before the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century. Very little is known about the history of the language. However, according to linguists such as Dr. David Zorc and Dr. Robert Blust, the Tagalogs originated, along with their Central Philippine cousins, from northeastern Mindanao or eastern Visayas The first known book to be written in Tagalog is the Doctrina Cristiana (Christian Doctrine) of 1593. It was written in Spanish and two versions of Tagalog; one written in Baybayin and the other in the Latin alphabet. Throughout the 333 years of Spanish occupation, there have been grammars and dictionaries written by Spanish clergymen such as Vocabulario de la Lengua Tagala by Pedro de San Buenaventura (Pila, Laguna, 1613), Vocabulario de la lengua tagala (1835) and Arte de la lengua tagala y manual tagalog para la adminstración de los Santos Sacramentos (1850). Poet Francisco "Balagtas" Baltazar (1788-1862) is regarded as the foremost Tagalog writer. His most famous work is the early 19th-century Florante at Laura. In 1937, Tagalog was selected as the basis of the national language by the National Language Institute. In 1959, Tagalog, which had been renamed Wikang Pambansa ("National Language") by President Manuel L. Quezon in 1939, was renamed by the Secretary of Education, Jose Romero, as Pilipino to give it a national rather than ethnicity label and connotation. The changing of the name did not, however, result in better acceptance at the conscious level among non-Tagalogs, especially Cebuanos who had not accepted the selection. In 1971, the language issue was revived once more,and a compromise solution was worked out — a ‘universalist’ approach to the national language, to be called Filipino rather than Pilipino. When a new constitution was drawn up in 1987, it named Filipino as the national language. The constitution specified that as that Filipino language evolves, it shall be further developed and enriched on the basis of existing Philippine and other languages. .

Persian (Farsi) is an Indo-European language spoken in Iran (Persia), Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. It is derived from the language of the ancient Persian people. Persian and its varieties have official-language status in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. According to CIA World Factbook, there are approximately 64 million native speakers of Persian in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and about the same number of people in other parts of the world speak Persian. UNESCO was asked to select Persian as one of its languages in 2006. Persian has been a medium for literary and scientific contributions to the Islamic world as well as the Western. It has had an influence on certain neighbouring languages, particularly the Turkic languages of Central Asia, Caucasus, and Anatolia. It has had a lesser influence on Arabic and other languages of Mesopotamia. For five centuries prior to the British colonization, Persian was widely used as a second language in the Indian subcontinent; it took prominence as the language of culture and education in several Muslim courts in India and became the "official language" under the Mughal emperors. Only in 1843 did the subcontinent begin conducting business in English. Evidence of Persian's historical influence in the region can be seen in the extent of its influence on the languages of Hindustani (resulting in Urdu), Kashmiri, Punjabi, Sindhi, Gujarati, Bengali and even Telugu, as well as the popularity that Persian literature still enjoys in the region. Persian, the more widely used name of the language in English, is an Anglicized form derived from Latin *Persianus < Latin Persia < Greek ?????? Pérsis, a Hellenized form of Old Persian Parsa. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term Persian seems to have been first used in English in the mid-16th century. Native Persian speakers call it "F?rsi" (local name) or Parsi. Farsi is the arabicized form of Parsi, due to a lack of the /p/ phoneme in Standard Arabic. According to Pejman Akbarzadeh, "... In English, however, this language has always been known as "Persian" ('Persane' in French and 'Persisch' in German). But many Persians migrating to the West (particularly to the USA) after the 1979 revolution continued to use 'Farsi' to identify their language in English and the word became commonplace in English-speaking countries." "Farsi" is encountered frequently in the linguistic literature as a name for the language, used both by Iranian and by foreign authors, and is preferred by some.However, The Academy of Persian Language and Literature has declared in an official pronouncement that the name "Persian" is more appropriate, as it has the longer tradition in the western languages and better expresses the role of the language as a mark of cultural and national continuity.