Homa Katouzian

“IRAN AND PERSIA Despite the Iranian conspiratorial theories cited above, it was not a conspiracy for the British to call Iran ‘Persia’, the French ‘Perse’ the Germans ‘Persien’, and so on. When the Greeks (from whom European civilizations descend) first came across the Iranians, Persian Iranians were ruling that country as the Persian empire. It was therefore no more of a conspiracy for them to call it ‘Persis’ than for the Persians who first came into contact with Ionian Greeks to call the entire Greek lands ‘Ionia’. To this day Iranians refer to Greece as Ionia (i.e., Yunan) and the Greeks as Ionians (i.e., Yunaniyan). Indeed, some scholars, such as Gnoli, have doubted if the Achaemenid Persians described their empire as Iran (or a variation of that term), but this is a generally unresolved question which need not detain us here. The cultural and intellectual menace of the word Farsi needs a brief mention. In recent western usage the word Farsi has been used alternatively for the Persian language. Farsi is the Persian word for ‘Persian’ just as Deutsch is the German word for ‘German’ and Français for ‘French’. But no one would use Deutsch for German or Français for French when speaking English, even though those words are more familiar than Farsi to the English-speaking peoples. Unlike Persian, Farsi has no cultural or historical connotations, and hardly any English-speaker would have heard of ‘Farsi literature’, or would be able to locate it if he or she did. To many Europeans, Persian is known as a language of culture and literature, but very few of them would know the meaning of Farsi even as a language.”
― Homa Katouzian, The Persians: Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern Iran