Maybe in Quebec or France, Star Burger would get into trouble for choosing an English name.
Here in Iran, it not only gets away with an English name, it pours salt on the wounds of the pure-Persianist by phonetically writing the name in Farsi script.
Never mind that most people wouldn’t know exactly where the words “estar” or “berger” come from. Quickly and happily they add them to today's vernacular Persian, a potpourri of classical Farsi (rest in peace), Arabic, French, English and other tongues.
Deciphering store signs requires the art of simultaneously reading Persian and some other language phonetically written in Farsi.
Even reading the newspaper has become a chore, my father tells me.
"I kept seeing this word that looked like 'consel' or 'conosel' and kept wondering what is it. Finally, I realized they've written 'cancel', like such and such concert was cancelled. They could've used many Persian words to say the same thing."
Samsung, Panasonic, Toyota, Coca Cola, every world brand has its own countenance in Farsi script.
But brands aside, Iranians go out of their way to mix in anything else they can get their mouths around.
“Maan voicemaileh shomah-roh beh mobilam deerooz divert kardam,” an acquaintance casually informs me.
He is saying: “Yesterday I diverted your voicemail to my mobile [phone].”
The poor soul who only reads pure Persian would starve in this restaurant, inside a government-run park. Every single item is presented in Farsi-scripted Western words. The numbers didn't go Farsi, though, perhaps for that extra touch of irony.
Maybe better to let Iranians use phonetic English and not try to translate. Here buffet made it relatively intact into what sounds like "boo-feh", but the Persian translation of children's playground to English somehow became "childrens landspeculation". Maybe someone's acerbic joke at the skyrocketing land prices here.
You know, sometimes I wonder why I’m even labeled as a foreigner here.
At least one guy thought I'm more Iranian than the Iranians living in Tehran.
“Every word you speak is actually Persian," he tells me, "which is a rarity now. Most young people in Tehran are constantly trying to pepper in foreign words.”
They think doing so is cool, I’m told.
Until a few years ago, the government, a la Québécois, tried and tried to cleanup the language.
Businesses were fined, signs destroyed, countless man-hours spent dreaming up Persian equivalents to technological terms. The computer is rayaneh in the government's tongue, the only way to communicate in much of the literature.
So the newspaper that is confusing people with the Persian-ized English and French words also bugs them with computer classifieds that one can't decipher.
Solemn vows taken to fight to death the “tahajomeh farhangi” [cultural invasion] beaming into satellite dishes day and night and metastasizing through one of the world's youngest society's. Half of the 70 million people are under 30.
But the satellite dishes are still there and at least in Tehran businesses go out of their way to choose foreign names.
Identity Abuse: if the people who built the Persian Empire only knew where copies of their artwork would end up. Tourist Burger, Isfahan, Iran
“One thing you should know about the Iranian,” a friend tells me. “It’s that they are the absolute experts at destroying the system.”
He means that no matter who happens to be lording over them at the time—the Greek, the Arab, the Mongol, or today's Islamic regime—Iranians are specialists at disobeying the rules set by the conqueror, to eventually make mince meat of the culture of the subjugator, to the point that often they end up co-opting the master.