http://www.ocmetro.com/metro070804/Cover070804.html Persian Power
By Stan Brin
But Bakhtjou is not a typical immigrant: She has been living in the United States for only 18 months. While even most Iranian-Americans consider her story somewhat unusual, she illustrates the rapid success this new local community has experienced in the past 25 years. From the Moshayedi brothers, founders of SimpleTech, a $300-million public company included on Inc. Magazine’s list of the Fastest Growing Companies in America, to Paul Makarechian, owner of the St. Regis Resort and Spa in Dana Point, to Dr. Fardad Fateri, former president of DeVry University, Iranians have achieved prominence in every aspect of business and the professions, from high-tech to education and the arts.
Persian accents are heard everywhere in Orange County, especially in Irvine and the South County area, but most people don’t know who Iranian-Americans are. In fact, nobody seems to know how many Iranian-Americans actually live in Orange County.
Worse, Iranian-Americans have had a difficult time being recognized as a distinct community by the public, the mass media, even the government, all of which tend to confuse them with Arab-Americans.
But as any Iranian-American will tell you, Persians are not Arabs, any more than Koreans are Japanese.
In fact, relations between Iran, or Persia, as the country was traditionally called, and the Arab world have been tense for many centuries (see sidebar, “The Tragic Pageant of Persian History”). And nothing annoys Iranian-Americans more than being mistaken for Arabs their accent and appearance is very different.
Persian or Iranian?
They’re both, actually. Persia, or Fars, is the ancient term for the country. The people and their language are called Farsi.
And as all Persians are quick to point out, their language is not related to Arabic in any way. Like English, Italian, Russian, Urdu and Hindi, Persian is a member of the Indo-European family of languages and shares a number of grammatical ties. Some words, such as the Persian “lab” for the English “lip,” haven’t changed since the first Indo-European tribes went their separate ways perhaps 5,000 years ago.
The term Iran is derived from Aryan, the name historians and anthropologists gave to a wave of tribes that migrated out of the Caucacus Mountains, traveling south and east into Persia and India.
Reza Shah adopted the current official name, Iran, in 1935, and the current regime has never changed it back