Should Persian/Farsi eventually switch over to the Latin alphabet?

First of all a bit of an introduction: I'm studying another language right now so I don't have time to study Persian full-time, but because I think I'd like to go at it next I've been putting in about 20 minutes a day, going over the basic grammar and so on, and the Turkish I know has helped out a lot given all the loanwords back and forth between those two. I also really like the language, and it's in this spirit that I write this.

Persian is an Indo-European language, but a quick overview of the grammar shows it to be ridiculously easy compared to most of the other Indo-European languages we're used to. This is a good thing. It has no gender (as opposed to three in German, two in French, three in Latin etc.), verb conjugation is surprisingly simple (every single verb conjugates regularly in the past tense, only the odd irregular present tense stem needs to be learned and then after that the rest is perfectly regular as well), no articles (great for Japanese/Koreans/Turks etc.), pronunciation is not too hard aside from perhaps the gh sound for some, negatives are formed with a simple na- prefix, making the plural is regular except for the odd Arabic loanword (and even then it's acceptable to just use the regular plural suffix), and so on.

That means that for a lot of people the only difficult part of learning Persian is the alphabet. This includes not just English speakers, but also nations that use the Latin alphabet including Turkish, as well as speakers of completely unrelated languages like Japanese and Korean who are used to the Latin alphabet and would have a much easier time learning Persian with it.

This doesn't mean that I believe every nation should switch over to the Latin alphabet: It doesn't work for languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Technically it would work but at the same time it would also change the entire language to the extent that it wouldn't work. I won't get into the details in this post though. I'm aware that the Dungan language is a version of Chinese that uses the Cyrillic alphabet so there is a type of Chinese that exists using an alphabet instead of hanzi, but it is kept similar to Chinese thanks to its overwhelming influence, and in a world where the opposite is the case (where 99% of Chinese speakers use Dungan with Cyrillic and only 1% know hanzi) you'd see a different language emerge pretty quick.

So I'm not an avid advocate of the Latin alphabet for every language. However, the Arabic alphabet Persian uses now is an alphabet, and alphabets are much easier to change. English switched over from Runic for example, which was an alphabet, and just about any language that uses an alphabet could be written with a different alphabet (usually with a few modifications). I could write English in Cyrillic, you could write Russian in Greek letters. And Persian can be written with other alphabets too. In fact, it's already written in Cyrillic in Tajikistan, which uses a language pretty much the same as Persian.

In addition, there is no real overriding cultural reason to use the Arabic alphabet for Persian. Iranians aren't Arabs, Persian is an Indo-European language, and it used to be written like this:



and this:

Added to this is the fact that long vowels aren't written in the Arabic alphabet, which means that a lot of words with different pronunciations are written the same way when using this alphabet. Turkish used to be written with the Arabic alphabet but switched over to the Latin alphabet which is much more suitable (theoretically Cyrillic could have been suitable as well), making the language easier to read and easier to study for other people as well.

Lastly, what about the religious argument? Is Islam an inherent part of Iran's culture, and thus they need to continue to use the Arabic alphabet? The answer may be yes to the first, but no to the second. I'm told that Persia after converting to Islam continued to use their own alphabet for 150 years until they switched over to the Perso-Arabic script. Well, does that mean for these 150 years these Muslims were somehow less Muslim than the ones that used the Arabic script? Are Muslims in Indonesia less Muslim than those that use an Arabic script? I think not. So we can discard this argument right now. Christians that can't read Ancient Greek are no less Christian than those that can. It would be nice to read Ancient Greek, sure, but English does fine with the Latin alphabet and Christians can be perfectly Christian without it as well. I've even heard that most Buddhists in Asia don't know Sanskrit!

I'm not suggesting a quick switch over to the Latin alphabet right now in 2008, but eventually I think it would benefit the language in making it more appealing and easier to learn for the average person that doesn't have that much affinity with languages. Because really Persian is a very simple and logical language encapsulated in a difficult-looking shell. It would be wonderful to see it made more learnable by not just English speakers but by Turks, Koreans, Japanese, and so on.

So why am I so concerned with how Persian promotes itself? That's easy:

1. I don't think English will become the world's second language, and the sooner this becomes obvious the better. I would like to see other major languages assert themselves as viable alternatives that people would like to learn, which is why I'm looking forward to seeing Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan switch over to the Latin alphabet as well, because this will strengthen Turkic languages as a whole: in other words, a person learning Turkish or another Turkic language will get more out of the effort they put in.
2. Pretty much the same as point #1: I'm a supporter of IALs such as Ido and Latino sine Flexione, and the less people are convinced that English will be the world language the better. A strong, easy-to-learn Persian language helps a bit here. As would more stability from Iran to Tajikistan, which would create a large area where the language can be used, from the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea all the way to the western edge of China (see the image at the top of the post for where it is spoken).
   
3. Persian is an Indo-European language and a lot of people don't realize that. Iranians are often mistaken for Arabs by a lot of people. Not that there's anything wrong with being an Arab of course, but it is rather silly when you see people make comments like "Arab countries like Iraq and Iran" every once in a while. I'm also interested in the revival of Modern Indo-European and perhaps this could help forge a bit more of a common identity.

So what's the verdict? Am I wrong? Or would an eventual switch to the Latin alphabet actually strengthen the language as I hope it would?

As a bit of an appendix, here are some more concrete examples of how the Latin alphabet would be better.

Ezafe (also written something like ézâfé): This is a mostly unwritten particle mostly equivalent to the English 'of'. It's pronounced 'eh' and you need to say it, but most of the time you just have to know where it is. Example:

• دفتر - daftar (letters dftr). Means office.
• بزرگ - bozorg (letters bzrg). Means big.
• دفتربزرگ اسث - daftar bozorg ast. Means the office is big (note how ast is like German ist). However, what about this?
  
• دفتربزرگ - hm, that's just daftar + bozorg. So it's 'daftar bozorg', right? Well, probably not. It's probably daftar-e-bozorg, which means a big office. Something like 'office of big'. That's the unwritten ezafe.

و: This letter is a bit of a silly one in Persian. Sometimes it's pronounced va (which means and), sometimes o (which also means and), sometimes it's a long u (û).

Unwritten short vowels and consonants: here are a few good examples.

• کل (koll) - this means head. It's written k+l.
• سن (senn) - this means age. It's written s+n.
• چشم (chesm) - this means eye. It's written ch+sh+m. It's tricky because there is no short vowel betweel sh and m where you think there might be one.

And so on. For some people (like me) this is great fun, and I enjoy quirks in language. One other good thing about Persian is that it gives you a good base for reading Arabic later on, but most people learn languages for the language itself, and not for the benefits it provides in learning the next one. So it's in this light that I've written this post.

Would Persian be a stronger language with a different alphabet?
If you haven't studied the language, do you think you would if it used the Latin alphabet and you were aware of how easy and logical it is?
Any other thoughts on the subject?