Just a minor pet peeve but why not keep calling the language "Persian" in English? Just how it doesn't feel entirely right to suddenly start calling Spanish "Español" in English, or Swedish as "Svenska" and so on
It is so unfortunate. I am from Iran and I much prefer the current name. It's an ancient name that includes not only Persians, but also Medians, Partians, etc. Iran has been multi cultural since old times and it's nice to have an inclusive name. I believe after we throw the occupiers (mullahs) out, we have a lot of work to do.
The only weird thing with the name Iran, is that it literally means "The Land of Aryans" which got a bad rep after Nazis (rightfully so).
Yes the country is for ever Iran, for all iranians of different ethnicities. The connotation in tourists's mind about "Iran" has to change, were the country to be called Persia today, it would have the same negative sound to it like Iran (arguably) does for some today. Also, most people would be able to distinguish a nazi use of the term Aryan and it's original meaning so that's really not a problem with the name Iran
I know that you're not confusing this but as some others might: Persian language is of the Persian people (although there are many non-persian L2 speakers), it should rightfully still called that and should not be confused with the (settled at this point) debate about the name of the country as a whole
Something similar that confuses me is the recent shift from calling the river "Yangtze" in English to calling it "Yangzi".
Yangzi is the correct pinyin spelling of the syllables that "Yangtze" was meant to indicate. (Similarly, if you want to spell them in modern pinyin, you'd have Laozi instead of Lao Tzu/Tze, Sunzi instead of Sun Tzu, and of course Kongzi instead of Confucius.) But the Chinese name of the river is something completely different. What's the point of updating the spelling of the English name as if it were also the Chinese name?
My (open to correction) understanding was that "Farsi" has some use in referring to the Iranian standardization of Persian (as contrasted to Dari, its Afghani counterpart).
Both are correct. "Farsi" is actually the Arabic version of "Parsi" (meaning "Persian" in, well, Persian). As a Persian, I personally don't use "Farsi".
Yes, it is useful when you want to contrast Iranian Persian with other varieties used in Afghanistan, Tajikistan etc., but when talking about all of them together it is confusing.
One of the slides by some IBM consultants presenting at the financial firm I used to work stated "Western Civilization runs on the mainframe." Considering how much banks still use mainframes, this is probably true.
I recently listened to a podcast episode which featured a gentleman who teaches mainframe related things at a university in the US and is deeply involved with the Open Mainframe Project. His statistic was 95% of financial transactions touch a mainframe somewhere along the way.
From what I know, considering it's not "just" banks but pretty much any long running financial business (IE insurance companies), I believe it's one of the most used but least talked about technologies out there.
Can confirm. In a past life I had the pleasure of auditing the COBOL code of a major US insurer. They had a separate program for every line of service (Auto/GL/etc.) that would read every claim record and produce their actuarial tables.
It was pretty fascinating to see how it all came together. Also despite the languages age after analyzing it for a length of time it was clearly elegant for that type of financial processing.
Not just financial businesses. For instance, I worked on a product also used by one of the largest package shipping companies. A couple of their key systems consisted of mainframes running COBOL code.
If you like to listen to podcasts and are curious about mainframes, get Terminal Talk. It’s a lot of fun and the mainframe ecosystem is a completely alien biosphere totally different from the Unix space we are more used to see.
