Hi everyone, I'm writing what I'm calling an anachronistic historical fiction. Basically it's (Athens vs Sparta) vs Persia... set in space. I don't want to directly call out the city names, so Athens and Sparta refer to themselves by the stars of their home planets, which I've named after the regions of Greece that host these cities. Attica and Lacedonia respectively. I've been scouring google and wikipedia for the word used by the Persians to refer to all Greeks. I have found "Younan" which is a corruption of Ionia, the Greek word for their colonies in Asia minor. This word appears to refer to land rather than people. I also hit up www.freetranslation.com and told it I wanted English translated to Turkish. When I put in Greek, it returned Yunan. When I put in Greece, it returned Yunanistan. Yunan sounds a lot like the Younan, and I doubt the Persians would have refered to Greece as Younanistan. So, I was wondering if anyone here knew how to convert Younan to it's proper adjective form... or assuming that is the adjective, tell me what the noun is. Thanks for even reading this far, --X
Your biggest problem is that the ancient dialects of Farsi are written with a completely different alphabet and format (right to left). رومیان rūmiyān (pl. of rūmī), Romans; Greeks Here is the source: http://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/search3advanced?dbname=steingass&query=Greek&matchtype=exact&display=utf8 This is "Greek" in Farsi. يوناني Notice there is no English pronunciation offered in the English to Farsi dictionary. You will probably need a person of Persian descent to provide an accurate transliteration so you can represent it in English. This link claims to have a 45,000 word English-Farsi dictionary: http://www.ariadic.com/
