Register in a School Letter: شما or تو?
A letter-writing task asks for two short Persian letters of about sixty words each: one to the school principal requesting a day's leave, and one to a younger cousin inviting him to a family gathering. A student's draft to the principal begins جناب آقای مدیر، شما آمدی و نامهٔ مرا خواندی and closes با تشکر، دوست تو. The draft to the cousin begins جناب آقای عزیز، شما تشریف بیاورید and closes با احترام فراوان، بنده. The teacher must mark both drafts for register, verb agreement, and closing formula, and must explain why a form that is polite in one letter is inappropriate in the other. The student protests that "polite is polite" and asks why the same address cannot be used for both.
1. Correct the principal's letter and justify each change by register, not by habit.
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Corrected opening: جناب آقای مدیر، شما تشریف آوردید و نامهٔ مرا خواندید, or more simply حضور محترم جناب آقای مدیر. The draft's آمدی is wrong in two ways: the ending -ی is second-person singular, which clashes with شما, and آمدن is too plain for an address to a principal. You should either use شما with a plural ending (آمدید، خواندید) or avoid the verb entirely. The closing دوست تو is intimate and belongs to a peer or a younger relative; for a principal, use با احترام یا با تشکر فراوان, without a possessive “your friend.” The principle is that register has three parts: the address form, the verb ending that agrees with it, and the closing formula. All three must point to the same level of formality.
2. Correct the cousin's letter and explain why the principal's formulas are misplaced there.
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Corrected opening: سلام عزیزم، امیدوارم خوب باشی or جانم، برای مهمانی بیا. The draft uses جناب آقای عزیز, a formal address suited to an adult stranger or official, and شما تشریف بیاورید, a ceremonial invitation. To a younger cousin these sound distant or teasing. The closing بنده is self-lowering formal style and clashes with the warm invitation; use something like منتظرت هستم or دوستدار تو. The reasoning is relational: Persian marks intimacy and deference differently, and a letter to a cousin should signal closeness. Politeness is not a single scale from rude to formal; it is a choice of the right register for the relationship.
3. The student says "polite is polite." Give a two-step decision procedure for choosing address forms in any letter.
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Step one: identify the relationship and the purpose. A request to an authority calls for deference; an invitation to a relative calls for warmth. Step two: make the three markers agree: address (جناب آقای / سلام), pronoun and verb agreement (شما with plural endings for deference; تو with singular endings for intimacy), and closing (با احترام for formal; دوستدار تو for intimate). Then check for clashes, such as شما آمدی, which mixes deference and intimacy, or جناب آقای to a child, which mixes formality with the wrong relationship. If a marker clashes, change it to match the dominant relationship rather than adding more politeness words. This procedure generalizes beyond these two letters and prevents the error of treating formality as universally better.