Daryoush Ashouri

Dariush Ashouri, born August 2, 1938, in Tehran, is an Iranian writer, translator, linguist, and thinker. He studied at Alborz and Dar ul-Funun high schools and later read economics at the University of Tehran. His intellectual activity began in his youth with writing, translation, editing, and encyclopedic work, and his first major work, Farhang-e Siyasi (Political Culture), later titled Daneshnameh-ye Siyasi (Political Encyclopedia), became one of the most widely cited Persian sources in political science.

Ashouri is a multifaceted figure in contemporary Iranian culture: a translator of classical Western philosophy and literature, a theorist of modern Persian, and an author in the fields of modernity, culture, and the humanities. Persian bibliographic sources also describe him as a writer, translator, linguist, and thinker whose works span political science, social sciences, philosophy, linguistics, and literary criticism.

Ashouri's most important contribution to contemporary Persian culture is his effort to empower the Persian language to express modern concepts. In works such as Bazandishi-ye Zaban-e Farsi (Rethinking the Persian Language), Zaban-e Baz (The Open Language), and Farhang-e Olum-e Ensani (The Culture of the Humanities), he demonstrates that Persian, in order to engage with philosophy, social sciences, technology, and modern knowledge, requires lexical expansion, compounding, and a clearer writing style.

Along these lines, Ashouri introduced or popularized words and equivalents such as gofteman (discourse), hameporsi (referendum), armanshahr (utopia), rahyaft (approach), darsgoftar (lecture), and many other compounds in contemporary Persian. His Farhang-e Olum-e Ensani is also said to contain hundreds of new compounds and words aimed at expanding Persian in the fields of philosophy and the humanities.