منطق

What it means

منطق (manteq) is logic. The discipline, the field of study, the systematic science of valid reasoning that Aristotle codified and that Islamic philosophers transmitted into Persian intellectual life. The word covers both the formal academic subject (deductive logic, syllogism, fallacies) and the informal sense of internal coherence (the manteq of an argument, the manteq of a story, the manteq of a person’s behavior).

You will see منطق in two main contexts: as a school subject (دانشجوی منطق, dāneshju-ye manteq, a logic student) and as an everyday metaphor (منطقش چیه؟ manteqesh chiye, what’s its logic, what is the rationale behind it).

Manteq vs manteghi

This is the distinction to lock in. منطق (manteq) is the noun, logic, the discipline. منطقی (manteghi) is the adjective, logical, having the property of logic. The relationship is identical to English logic vs logical. You study منطق; you call an argument منطقی. Mixing them up is a common beginner error: you cannot say یک منطق آدم (yek manteq ādam) for a logical person; you need یک آدم منطقی (yek ādam-e manteghi).

How to use it

Common frames: منطق داشتن (manteq dāshtan, to have logic, to make sense), از روی منطق (az ruy-e manteq, based on logic), and the dismissive این منطق نداره (in manteq nadāre, this has no logic to it).

harf-esh manteq nadāre.

What he is saying has no logic to it.

حرفش منطق نداره.

arastu pedar-e manteq mahsub mishavad.

Aristotle is considered the father of logic.

ارسطو پدر منطق محسوب می‌شود.

manteq-e in tasmim-o nemifahmam.

I don’t understand the logic of this decision.

منطق این تصمیم رو نمی‌فهمم.

Where it comes from

Manteq is Arabic, from the root n-t-q (ن-ط-ق), which means speech, articulation, the faculty of rational expression. Arabic مَنْطِق (manṭiq) named the discipline that the early Islamic translators built when they rendered Aristotle’s Organon into Arabic in the eighth and ninth centuries. The choice of word was deliberate: logic was understood as the science of correctly-articulated speech, of reasoning that can be put into words and tested. Persian inherited the term directly from this tradition, and figures like Avicenna (ابن سینا, ebn-e sinā) wrote major works of منطق in both Arabic and Persian, establishing the vocabulary still in use.

In our voice

Manteq sits at the intersection of classical Islamic philosophy and everyday Persian. The same word a tenth-century scholar used to name Aristotelian syllogism is the word a modern Tehrani uses to dismiss someone’s bad argument. The continuity is one of the quiet beauties of the language.

References

• Dehkhoda, منطق
• Vajehyab, منطق