Persian language

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Persian (فارسی = Fârsi ... پارسی = Pârsi), (local name in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan: ‘Fârsi’), ‘Pârsi’ (older local name, but still used by some speakers), Tajik (a Central Asian dialect) or Dari (another local name in Tajikistan and Afghanistan), is a language spoken in Iran, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, western Pakistan, Bahrain, and elsewhere. Prior to British colonization, Persian was also widely used as a second language in the Indian subcontinent; it took prominence as the language of culture and education in several Muslim courts in the subcontinent throughout the Middle Ages and became the official court language under the Mughal emperors. Evidence of its former rank in the region can still be seen by the extent of its influence on Urdu, as well as the popularity that Persian literature still enjoys in the region. Persian or its dialects have official-language status in the countries of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. There are 61-71 million native speakers [1]. It belongs to the Indo-European language family, and is of the Subject Object Verb type.

History

Persian is a member of the Indo-European family of languages, and within that family it belongs to the Indo-Iranian (Aryan) branch. Scholars believe the Iranian subbranch consists of the following chronological linguistic path: Old Persian (Avestan and Achaemenid Persian) → Middle Persian (Pahlavi, Parthian, and Sassanids Persian) → Modern Persian (Dari, c. 900 to present Persian).

Old Persian, the main language of the Achaemenid inscriptions, should not be confused with the non-Indo-European Elamite language (see Behistun inscription). Over this period, the morphology of the language was simplified from the complex conjugation and declension system of Old Persian to the almost completely regularized morphology and rigid syntax of Modern Persian, in a manner often described as paralleling the development of English. Additionally, many words were introduced from neighboring languages, including Aramaic and Greek in earlier times, and later Arabic and to a lesser extent Turkish. In more recent times, some Western European words have entered the language (notably from French and English).

The language itself has greatly developed during the centuries. Due to technological developments, new words and idioms are created and enter into Persian like any other language. In Tehran the Academy of Persian Language and Literature is a center that evaluates the new words in order to initiate and advise their Persian equivalents. In Afghanistan, the Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan does the same for Afghan Persian (among other languages).

Nomenclature

Persian, the more widely used name of the language in English, is the Hellenized form of the native term Parsi. Farsi is the Arabicized form of Parsi, due to a lack of the /p/ phoneme in Standard Arabic. Its use in the English language is very recent (since the 1970s). Native Persian speakers typically call it "Fârsi" in modern usage. ISO, the Academy of Persian Language and Literature, and many other sources call the language Persian. The government of Afghanistan uses both "Dari" and "Persian" in English communications.

The Academy of Persian Language and Literature as well as many lexicographers have announced that "Farsi" is not the appropriate term to use for the Persian language in English. In the ISO 639-1, the local names form the basis for the language codes and for this reason "fa" is the designation for the Persian language in that system.

Dialects and close languages

Communication is generally mutually intelligible between Iranians, Tajiks, and Persian-speaking Afghans; however, by popular definition:

• Dari is the local name for the eastern dialect of Persian, one of the two official languages of Afghanistan, including Hazaragi — spoken by the Hazara people of central Afghanistan.
• Tajik could also be considered an eastern dialect of Persian, but, contrary to Iranian and Afghan Persian, it is written in the Cyrillic script.

The following are some of the closely related languages of various Iranian peoples within modern Iran proper:

• Mazerooni, or Mazandarani, spoken in northern Iran mainly in the province of Mazandaran.
• Guilaki, or Gilaki — spoken in the province of Guilan.
• Talysh, or Talishi — spoken in northern Iran and southern parts of the Republic of Azerbaijan.
• Luri, or Lori — spoken mainly in the southwestern Iranian province of Lorestan.
• Tat (a.k.a. Tati, or Eshtehardi) — spoken in parts of the Iranian provinces of East Azarbaijan, Zanjan and Qazvin.
• Dari or Gabri — spoken originally in Yazd and Kerman by the Zoroastrians of Iran. Also called Yazdi by some.
• Dzhidi or Judæo-Persian — a collection of languages or dialects spoken by the many varied and ancient Jewish communities throughout the former greatest extent of the Persian Empire, one of the many Jewish languages of Persian Jews.

Orthography

The vast majority of modern Persian text is written in a form of the Arabic alphabet. In recent years the Latin alphabet has been used by some for technological or internationalization reasons.

Arabic Alphabet

Main article: Persian alphabet

Modern Persian is standardly written using a modified variant of the Arabic alphabet.

The adoption of the Arabic script

After the conversion of Persia to Islam (see Islamic conquest of Iran), it took approximately one hundred and fifty years before Persians adopted the Arabic alphabet as a replacement for the older alphabet. Previously, two different alphabets were used for the Persian language (Middle Persian, or Pahlavi, at that time): one was also called Pahlavi and was a modified version of the Aramaic alphabet, and the other was a native Iranian alphabet called Dîndapirak (literally: religion script).

Note: "independence" of Arabic and Persian languages

One should note that despite their shared standard alphabet, Persian and Arabic are entirely different languages: they are not closely genetically related (they belong to separate genetic language families, namely, Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic) and naturally have different phonology and grammar.

The features of the Persian variant

The Persian variant adds four letters to the Arabic alphabet for its use, due to the fact that four sounds that exist in Persian do not exist in Arabic. Additionally, it changes the shape of another two. Some people call this modified alphabet the Perso-Arabic alphabet. The additional four letters are:

The letters different in shape are:

The diacritical marks used in the Arabic script, a.k.a. harakat, are also used in Persian, although some of them have different pronunciations. For example, an Arabic Damma is pronounced as /u/, while in Persian it is pronounced as /o/.

The Persian variant also adds the notion of a pseudo-space to the Arabic script, called a Zero-width non-joiner (ZWNJ) by the Unicode Standard. It acts like a space in disconnecting two otherwise-joining adjacent letters, but does not have a visual width.

Note: Spelling of Arabic words in Arabic and in Persian

It should also be noted that many Persian words with an Arabic root are spelled differently from the original Arabic word. Alef with hamza below ( إ ) always changes to alef ( ا ); teh marbuta ( ة ) usually, but not always, changes to teh ( ت ) or heh ( ه ); and words using various hamzas get spelled with yet another kind of hamza (so that مسؤول becomes مسئول).

Further expansion of the Persian variant

The features of the Persian variant have been taken for other languages, such as Pashto or Urdu, and have sometimes been further extended with new letters or punctuation.

Latin Alphabet

The Universal Persian (UniPers / Pârsiye Jahâni) Alphabet is a Latin-based alphabet created over 50 years ago in Iran and popularized by Mohamed Keyvan, who had used it in a number of Persian textbooks for foreigners and travellers. It sidesteps the difficulties of the traditional Arabic-based alphabet, with its multiple letter shapes and ambiguous spellings, and fits particularly well in contemporary electronically written media.

Fingilish is the name given to texts written in Persian using the Basic Latin alphabet. It is most commonly used in chat, emails and SMS applications.

Phonology

Main article: Persian phonology

The Persian language has six vowels and twenty-three consonants, including two affricates /ʧ/ (ch) and /ʤ/ (j). Historically, Persian distinguished length: the long vowels /i:/, /u:/, /ɑ:/ contrasting with the short vowels /e/, /o/, /æ/ respectively. Modern spoken Persian, however, generally does not make this distinction anymore.

Note that /ʧ/ and /ʤ/ are affricates, not stops.

Grammar

Main article: Persian grammar

Suffixes predominate Persian morphology, though there are a small number of prefixes. Verbs can express tense and aspect, and they agree with the subject in person and number. There is no grammatical gender for nouns, nor are pronouns marked for natural gender.

Normal sentences are structured as "(S) (PP) (O) V". If the object is definite, then the order is "(S) (O + "rɑ:") (PP) V".

Vocabulary

There are many loanwords in the Persian language, mostly coming from Arabic, English, French, and the Turkic languages.

Persian has likewise influenced the vocabularies of other languages, especially Indo-Iranian languages and Turkic languages. Many Persian words have also found their way into the English language. See List of English words of Persian origin.

See also

• Arabic numerals
• Dzhidi language
• List of English words of Persian origin
• Middle Persian literature
• History of Urdu
• Persian grammar
• Persian literature
• Persian phonology

References

• Mace, J. (2003). Persian Grammar: For reference and revision. Routledge-Curzon, London.
• Mahootian, S. (1997). Persian. Descriptive Grammars. Routledge, London.
• Windfuhr, G. L. (1987). Persian. In Comrie, B., editor, The World’s Major Languages, pages 523–546. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

External links

• Ethnologue report for Eastern Persian
• Ethnologue report for Western Persian
• Easypersian.com
• Dictionary with Farsi - English Translations from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition
• UCLA Language Materials Project: Persian
• UniPers.com A proposed Latin-based writing system designed specifically for the Persian language.
• [2] Persian Linguistics Association
• [3] American Association of Teachers of Persian (AATP)
• [4] The Centre for Promotion of Persian Language and Literature
• [5] VOA’s Persian Language Service
• [6] BBC’s Persian Language Service
• [7] DW’s Persian Service
• [8] An Online Persian Language Forumar:فارسية (لغة)

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