Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, nationalism and - TopicsExpress



          

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, nationalism and colonialism created fixed borders between societies that otherwise shared common ethnic backgrounds, language, and culture. If you separate the world by regions, India and Iran don’t initially appear to have much in common. But in the 1960s, University of Chicago historian Marshall Hodgson introduced the concept of Persianate society – arguing that in the pre-modern world, Iranians, the Ottoman Empire, the South Asian Indian Mogul empire, and even Central Asians all spoke Persian. Even today, when I’m listening to the news in Ukraine, I hear Persian words, and I say, Where did that come from?, says Mohamad Tavakoli, a professor of history and Near and Middle Eastern civilizations at the University of Toronto. These are traces of the earlier lingua franca function that Persian had that we have lost.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 17:38:21 +0000

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