PERSIAN USA: GEOGRAPHY, LANGUAGE AND JOURNALISM

by Fábio de Oliveira Ribeiro Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2012 at 4:50 AM
sithan@ig.com.br

American journalists have not learned nor geography nor semantics.

I just read on the internet that the Americans threaten to intervene in the Persian Gulf.

Such intervention, however, has no geographical or linguistic foundation .

The Persian Gulf is on the coast of Iran and not the USA coast. So for me, geographically, this news makes no sense. Geographically we can admit the legitimacy of an American intervention in San Francisco Bay, but not in the Iranian coastline because Iran is another country and does not want to be part of the USA.

The word "Persian" literally means "of Persia." Persia is now Iran, therefore, not even the name of the place (Persian Gulf) authorizes this USA intervention. If the name of the Persian Gulf was "America Gulf", "Los Gringos Gulf" or "Obama Gulf" or anything else that referred to the USA the intervention would be justified linguist and semantically. But this is not the case.