…Persian and Arabic are husband and wife."
Relating to the shared language family of the first two, and the close relationship (in classical and modern Farsi) between the last two despite their lack of a common language family.
What I want to know is: Who said it? Is it from Steingass’ Persian dictionary or Thackston’s Introduction to Persian, which is what I vaguely remember? Or somewhere else? (Is Johanna around by any chance?..)
I happen to have both those books, which is how I was able to rule out that it isn’t in either of them. Although Steingass does give a hilarious example of how to totally mistranslate an Arabic phrase using a Persian dictionary. This could be a real hazard since some Persian poems incorporate whole lines of Arabic at a time, quotations from Classical Arabic poets. A translator of Persian who hadn’t learned Arabic grammar could easily mistake certain conjugations of Arabic verbs for Persian nouns.
Thackston makes the unforgivably false statement “there are no cognates to speak of between English and Persian,” which is enough to enrage an Indo-Europeanist. So he seems an unlikely source for the sisterhood of Greek.
I looked through Ann Lambton’s Persian Grammar, no dice there either. Even though she includes a long section on the “Arabic element”: a grammar encapsulated inside another grammar, very strange.
I guess you’ve already noticed that Google can’t find the answer to this one either. Too bad, I’d like to know too, it’s an apt observation.