In a local casa rural this week, I came across two booklets giving Gallego translations for those travellers whose languages are, in one case, Catalan and Basque and, in the other, French and German. But nothing for us English and Spanish speakers. Perhaps there’s a third booklet covering these. Has anyone seen it? Can anyone find evidence for it on the Xunta’s web page? I can’t.

Truly there is no limit when you want your language to be ‘normalised’. In other words, advanced at the expense of Spanish. In parliament this week, the President of the Galician Nationalist Party demanded that Madrid pay heed to some EU decree or other and ensure we in Galicia can watch TV programs in Gallego’s sister language, Portuguese. As there’s an election coming up, the Prime Minister gave a non-committal but sympathetic response. He then tweaked the beard of the President of the PP party – who happens to hail from Pontevedra – by claiming that, although from León, he was a better Galician than the leader of the opposition. What fun. Another three months of this nonsense, with the BNG attempting to show us just what influential power-brokers they now are in Madrid.

Stimulated by a BBC podcast on the Sassanian empire, I’ve tossed a coin to decide whether I should prioritise my language learning in favour of Gallego or my rusty Farsi. My nationalist friends will be disappointed to hear that Farsi won. So I won’t be normalised for a while yet. I leave you with a few things you might not know about Iran and its people:-
Modern Iran is ancient Persia
Iranian/Persian/Farsi in not Arabic
Iranians are not Arabs but Aryans
Thanks to Islamic invasions in the 8^th century, Farsi uses the Arabic script but it is not exactly the same
Iranians are not at all fond of Arabs and get very upset at being confused with them
Iranians are mostly Shiite Moslems, whereas Arabs are very predominantly Sunni – another reason for mutual enmity
Even after defeat in the battles against the Greeks that we all now know about thanks to Hollywood, there was a massive Persian empire through the early centuries of the Christian era which stretched from Iraq in the west through Afghanistan in the east. It soundly defeated the armies of the Roman empire on a number of occasions.
There was a monotheist religion – Zoroastrianism – in Persia many centuries before Christ appeared in the Middle East
In view of their magnificent history and literature, Iranians react badly to being treated as illiterate goatherds. It can be very annoying, I guess, to lose a vast empire, go into decline and then have the rest of the world look down on you in its ignorance.

That’s enough for today. Except to tell you there's a good joke that ends with the line - It all goes to show you must never go for a Shiite when the train is standing in a station.