Persian (local names:
فارسی,
Farsi ; or
پارسی,
Parsi , see
Nomenclature) is an
Iranian language within the
Indo-Iranian branch of the
Indo-European languages.
It is
widely spoken in Iran
, Afghanistan
, Tajikistan
, Uzbekistan
and to some extent in Iraq
, Bahrain
, and
Oman
. New Persian, which usually is called also
by the names of Dari, Farsi, Parsi or Parsi-Dari, can be classified
linguistically as a continuation of
Middle Persian, the official religious and
literary language of
Sassanian Iran,
itself a continuation of
Old Persian,
the language of the
Achaemenids. Persian
is a
pluricentric language and
its grammar is similar to that of many contemporary European
languages. The Persian language has been a medium for literary and
scientific contributions to the eastern half of the
Muslim world.
Persian
has had a considerable influence on neighboring languages,
particularly the Turkic languages
in Central Asia, Caucasus, and Anatolia
, neighboring
Iranian languages, as well as Armenian and other languages. It
has also exerted a strong influence on South Asian languages,
especially
Urdu, as well as
Hindi,
Punjabi,
Sindhi,
Saraiki.
Classification
Persian belongs to the
Western
group of the
Iranian branch of
the
Indo-European language
family, and is of the
subject object
verb type. The Western Iranian group contains other related
languages such as
Kurdish,
Mazandarani,
Gilaki,
Talyshi and
Baluchi. The language is in the
Southwestern Iranian
group, along with and very similar to the
Tat language of Caucasus Larestani
and
Luri languages.
Nomenclature
Contemporary local nomenclature
English nomenclature
Persian, the more widely used name of the language in
English, is an Anglicized form
derived from
Latin * Latin
Greek , a
Hellenized form of Old Persian . According to the
Oxford English Dictionary,
the term
Persian seems to have been first used in English
in the mid-16th century. Native Persian speakers call it "Pārsi"
(local name) or
Fārsi.
Fārsi is the
arabicized form of
Parsi, due to a lack
of the 'p'
phoneme in Standard Arabic. In
English, this language is historically known as "Persian", though
some Persian-speakers migrating to the West continued to use
"Farsi" to identify their language in English and the word gained
some currency in English-speaking countries. "Farsi" is encountered
in some linguistic literature as a name for the language, used both
by Iranian and by foreign authors. According to the
OED, the term
Farsi was
first used in English in the mid-20th century. The
Academy of Persian
Language and Literature has declared that the name "Persian" is
more appropriate, as it has the longer tradition in the western
languages and better expresses the role of the language as a mark
of cultural and national continuity. Some Persian language scholars
also have rejected the usage of "Farsi" in their articles.
International nomenclature
The international language encoding standard
ISO 639-1 uses the code "fa", as its coding system
is mostly based on the local names. The more detailed draft
ISO 639-3 uses the name "Persian" (code
"fas") for the larger unit ("macrolanguage") spoken across Iran and
Afghanistan, but "Eastern Farsi" and "Western Farsi" for two of its
subdivisions (roughly coinciding with the varieties in Afghanistan
and those in Iran, respectively).
Ethnologue, in turn, includes "Farsi, Eastern"
and "Farsi, Western" as two separate entries and lists "Persian"
and "Parsi" as alternative names for each, besides "Irani" for the
western and "Dari" for the eastern form.
A similar terminology, but with even more subdivisions, is also
adopted by the
LINGUIST List, where
"Persian" appears as a subgrouping under "Southwest
Western Iranian". Currently,
VOA,
BBC,
DW, and
RFE/RL use "Persian Service" for their
broadcasts in the language.
RFE/RL also
includes a Tajik service, and an Afghan (Dari) service. This is
also the case for the
American Association
of Teachers of Persian, The Centre for Promotion of Persian
Language and Literature, and many of the leading scholars of
Persian language.
History
Persian is an Iranian tongue belonging to the
Indo-Iranian branch of the
Indo-European family of languages.
In general, Iranian languages are known from three periods, usually
referred to as Old, Middle, and New (Modern) periods. These
correspond to three eras in
Iranian history; Old era being the
period from sometime before Achaemenids, the Achaemenid era and
sometime after Achaemenids (that is to 400-300 BC), Middle era
being the next period most officially Sassanid era and sometime in
post-Sassanid era, and the New era being the period afterwards down
to present day. vi(2). Documentation.
According to available documents, Persian language is the only
Iranian language whose all three Old, Middle, and New stages are
known to represent one and the same language; i.e. New Persian is a
direct descendent of Middle and Old Persian.
The oldest records in
Old Persian date
back to the Persian Empire of the 6th century BC.
The known history of the Persian language can be divided into the
following three distinct periods:
Old Persian
Old Persian evolved from
Proto-Iranian as it evolved in the Iranian
plateau's southwest.
The earliest dateable example of the language
is the Behistun
Inscription
of the Achaemenid Darius I
(r. 522 BC – ca. 486 BC).
Although purportedly
older texts also exist (such as the inscription on the tomb of
Cyrus II at Pasargadae
), these are actually younger examples of the
language. Old Persian was written in
Old Persian cuneiform, a script
unique to that language and is generally assumed to be an invention
of Darius I's reign.
After
Aramaic, or rather the
Achaemenid form of it known as
Imperial Aramaic, Old Persian is the most
commonly attested language of the Achaemenid age.
While examples of Old
Persian have been found wherever the Achaemenids held territories,
the language is attested primarily in the inscriptions of Western
Iran, in particular in Parsa
"Persia" in
the southwest, the homeland of the tribes that the Achaemenids (and
later the Sassanids) came from.
In contrast to later Persian, written Old Persian had an
extensively
inflected grammar, with eight
cases, each
declension subject to both gender (masculine,
feminine, neuter) and number (singular,
dual, plural).
Middle Persian
In contrast to
Old Persian, whose spoken
and written forms must have been dramatically different from one
another, written
Middle Persian
reflected oral use. The complex
conjugation and
declension of Old Persian yielded to the
structure of Middle Persian in which the dual number disappeared,
leaving only singular and plural, as did gender. Middle Persian
used
postpositions to indicate the
different roles of words, for example an
-i suffix to
denote a possessive "from/of" rather than the multiple (subject to
gender and number)
genitive caseforms
of a word.
Although the "middle period" of
Iranian languages formally begins with the
fall of the
Achaemenid Empire, the
transition from Old- to Middle Persian had probably already begun
before the 4th century. However, Middle Persian is not actually
attested until 600 years later when it appears in
Sassanid era (224–651) inscriptions, so any form of
the language before this date cannot be described with any degree
of certainty. Moreover, as a literary language, Middle Persian is
not attested until much later, to the 6th or 7th century. And from
the 8th century onwards, Middle Persian gradually began yielding to
New Persian, with the middle-period form only continuing in the
texts of
Zoroastrian tradition.
The native
name of Middle Persian was Parsik or Parsig,
after the name of the ethnic group of the southwest, that is, "of
Pars", Old Persian Parsa, New Persian
Fars.
This is the origin of the name
Farsi as it is today used
to signify New Persian. Following the collapse of the Sassanid
state,
Parsik came to be applied exclusively to (either
Middle or New) Persian that was written in
Arabic script. From about the 9th century
onwards, as Middle Persian was on the threshold of becoming New
Persian, the older form of the language came to be erroneously
called
Pahlavi, which was actually but one of the
writing systems used to render both Middle Persian as well
as various other Middle Iranian languages. That writing system had
previously been adopted by the Sassanids (who were Persians, i.e.
from the southwest) from the preceding Arsacids (who were
Parthians, i.e. from the northeast). While Rouzbeh (
Abdullah Ibn al-Muqaffa, 8th
century) still distinguished between
Pahlavi (i.e.
Parthian) and
Farsi (i.e. Middle Persian), this
distinction is not evident in Arab commentaries written after that
date.
New Persian
The history of New Persian itself span more than 1000–1200 years.
The development of the language in its last period is often
considered in three stages of early, classical, and contemporary
periods. The fact that almost all current native speaker of the
language do understand ancient texts of Persian language and the
grammatical differences of ancient language is acquainted by today
speakers simply by reading and memorising those ancient texts gives
a special status to Persian language as a whole.
Early New Persian
Classic Persian
The
Islamic conquest of
Persia marks the beginning of the new history of Persian
language and literature. It saw world-notable poets and was for a
long time the
lingua franca of the
eastern parts of
Islamic world and of
the
Indian subcontinent. It was
also the official and cultural language of many Islamic dynasties,
including
Samanids,
Buyids,
Tahirids,
Ziyarids, the
Mughal
Empire,
Timurids,
Ghaznavid,
Seljuq,
Khwarezmids,
Safavid,
Afsharids,
Zand,
Qajar,
Ottomans and
also many Mughal successor states such as the
Nizams etc. For example, Persian was the only oriental
language known and used by
Marco Polo at
the Court of
Kublai Khan and in his
journeys through China. The heavy influence of Persian on other
languages can still be witnessed across the Islamic world,
especially, and it is still appreciated as a literary and
prestigious language among the educated elite, especially in fields
of music (for example
Qawwali) and art
(
Persian literature). After the
Arab invasion of Persia, Persian began to adopt many words from
Arabic and as time went by, a few
words were even taken from
Altaic
languages under the
Mongol Empire
and
Turco-Persian society.
Use in the Indian subcontinent
For five centuries prior to the
British
colonization, Persian was 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
South Asia and became
the sole "official language" under the
Mughal emperors. Coinciding with the
Safavid rule over Iran, when (royal)
patronage of Persian poets was curtailed, the centre of Persian
culture and literature moved to the Mughal Empire, which had huge
financial resources to employ a veritable army of Persian courtly
poets, lexicographers and other litterati. Beginning in 1843,
though,
English gradually replaced
Persian in importance on the subcontinent. Evidence of Persian's
historical influence there can be seen in the extent of its
influence on the languages of the Indian subcontinent, as well as
the popularity that
Persian
literature still enjoys in that region.
Contemporary Persian
A variant of the Iranian standard
ISIRI 9147 keyboard layout for Persian.
Since the nineteenth century,
Russian,
French and
English and many other languages have
contributed to the technical vocabulary of Persian. The Iranian
National
Academy of Persian
Language and Literature is responsible for evaluating these new
words in order to initiate and advise their Persian equivalents.
The language itself has greatly developed during the
centuries.
Varieties and dialects
There are three modern varieties of standard Persian:
- Modern Iranian Persian (Western Farsi) is
the variety of Persian spoken in Iran, also known
as Farsi (in Persian) or Persian (in English).
- Dari
(Eastern Farsi) is the local name for the Persian language spoken
in Afghanistan.
- Tajiki is the
variety of Persian used in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Russia
, but unlike
the Persian used in Iran and Afghanistan, it is written in the
Cyrillic script rather than Persian script.
The three mentioned varieties are based on the classic Persian
literature. There are also several local dialects from Iran,
Afghanistan and Tajikistan which slightly differ from the standard
Persian.
Hazaragi (in Afghanistan),
Darwazi (In Afghanistan and Tajikistan) and
Dehwari in Pakistan are examples of these
dialects.
ISO 639-3 lists ten dialects of Persian,
the three main literary dialects listed above and seven regional
dialects:
| ISO 639-3 |
Name |
Speakers CIA factbook/SIL Ethnologue |
Location |
| pes |
Western Farsi |
40 million/23,879,300 (based on 1997 estimate) |
Iran, Iranian diaspora |
|
| prs |
Eastern Farsi (Dari) |
16.5 million/7,600,000 (based on 1996 estimate) |
Afghanistan (Herat, Hazarajat, Balkh, Ghor, Ghazni, Budaksham,
Panjsher; Galcha-Pamir Mountains; Kabul regions), Iran (Dari in
Khorasan Province) |
|
| tgk |
Tajiki |
5.7 million /4,457,500 |
Tajikistan; also in Iran, Kazakhstan, Russian Federation
(Asia), Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan. |
| haz |
Hazaragi |
2,210,000 |
Afghanistan; also in Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan. |
|
| aiq |
Aimaq |
650,000 |
Afghanistan (west of Hazara), eastern Iran, Tajikistan
(Jamshidi and Khazara) |
| bhh |
Bukharic |
110,000 |
Israel, USA, Uzbekistan |
| jpr |
Dzhidi |
60,000 |
Israel |
| deh |
Dehwari |
13,000 |
Pakistan (Central Balochistan, Kalat, and Mastung) |
| drw |
Darwazi |
10,000 |
Afghanistan (Darwaz) |
| phv |
Pahlavani |
2,100 |
Afghanistan (Chakhansoor Province, Karim Kushta, Haji
Hamza Khan village) |
|
The following are some closely related languages to Persian:
Phonology
Iranian Persian has six vowels and twenty-three consonants,
including two affricates (ch) and (j).
Vowels
The vowel phonemes of modern Iranian
Persian
Historically, Persian has distinguished length: Early New Persian
possessed a series of five long vowels ( , , , and ) along with
three short vowels , and . At some point prior to the sixteenth
century within the general area that is today encompassed by modern
Iran, and merged into , and and merged into . Thus, the older
contrasts between words like
shēr "lion" and
shīr
"milk," were lost. There are exceptions to this rule and in some
words, "ē" and "ō" are preserved or merged into the diphthongs [eɪ]
and [oʊ] (which are descendents of the diphthongs [æɪ] and [æʊ] in
Early New Persian), instead of merging into /iː/ and /uː/. Examples
of this exception can be found in words such as [roʊʃæn]
(bright).
However, in the eastern varieties, the archaic distinction of and
(respectively known as
Yā-ye majhūl and
Yā-ye
ma'rūf) is still preserved, as well as the distinction of and
(known as
Wāw-e majhūl and
Wāw-e ma'rūf). On the
other hand, in standard
Tajik, the
length distinction has disappeared and merged with , and with .
Therefore, contemporary Afghan dialects are the closest one can get
to the vowel inventory of Early New Persian.
According to most studies on the subject (e.g. Samareh 1977,
Pisowicz 1985, Najafi 2001,) the three vowels which are
traditionally considered long ( , , ) are currently distinguished
from their short counterparts ( , , ) by position of articulation,
rather than by length. However, there are studies (e.g. Hayes 1979,
Windfuhr 1979) which consider vowel-length to be the active feature
of this system, i.e. /ɒ/, /i/, and /u/ are phonologically long or
bimoraic whereas /æ/, /e/, and /o/ are phonologically short or
monomoraic.
There are also some studies which consider quality and quantity to
be both active in the Iranian system (e.g. Toosarvandani 2004).
This view offers a synthetic analysis which includes both quality
and quantity, often suggesting that modern Persian vowels are in a
transition state between the quantitative system of classical
Persian and a hypothetical future Persian which will eliminate all
traces of quantity, and retain quality as the only active
feature.
Suffice it to say that the length-distinction is strictly observed
by careful reciters of classic-style poetry, for all varieties
(including the Tajik).
Consonants
(Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a
voiced consonant. Allophones are in phonetic brackets.)
Grammar
Morphology
Suffixes predominate Persian
morphology, though there is 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 in Persian, nor are
pronouns marked for
natural
gender.
Syntax
Normal declarative sentences are structured as "(S) (PP) (O) V".
This means sentences can comprise optional
subjects,
prepositional phrases, and
objects, followed by a required
verb. If the object is specific, then the object is
followed by the word
r : and precedes prepositional
phrases: "(S) (O + "r :") (PP) V".
Vocabulary
Native word formation
Persian makes extensive use of word building and combining affixes,
stems, nouns and adjectives. Persian frequently uses derivational
agglutination to
form new words from nouns, adjectives, and
verbal stems. New words are extensively formed by
compounding – two existing words
combining into a new one, as is common in
German. Professor
Mahmoud Hessaby demonstrated that Persian
can derive 226 million words.
Influences
While having a lesser influence on
Arabic and other languages of
Mesopotamia and its core vocabulary being of
Middle Persian origin, New Persian
contains a considerable amount of Arabic lexical items, which were
Persianized and often took a different meaning and usage than the
Arabic original. The Arabic vocabulary in
other Iranic, Turkic and Indic languages are generally understood
to be have been borrowed from new Persian..
John R. Perry in his book "Lexical Areas and Semantic Fields of
Arabic" indicates his belief that the overall range of Arabic
synonyms vocabulary used along or interchangeable with their
equivalents Persian words varies from 8.8% (with 2.4% frequency) in
the
Shahnameh, 14% in material culture,
24% in intellectual life to 40% of everyday literary activity. Most
of the Arabic words used in Persian are either synonyms of native
terms or could be (and often have been) glossed in Persian. The
Arabic vocabulary in Persian is thus suppletive, rather than basic
and has enriched New Persian.
The inclusion of Mongolian and Turkic elements in the Persian
language should also be mentioned, not only because of the
political role a succession of Turkic dynasties played in Iranian
history, but also because of the immense prestige Persian language
and literature enjoyed in the wider (non-Arab)Islamic world, which
was often ruled by sultans and emirs with a Turkic background. The
Turkish and Mongolian vocabulary in Persian is mediocre in
comparison and these words were mainly confined to military,
pastoral terms and political sector (titles, adminsitration, etc)
until new military and political titles were coined based partially
on Middle Persian (e.g. Artesh for army instead of Qoshun) in the
20th century.
There are also loanwords from
French
(mainly in the late 19th century and early 20th century) and
Russian (mainly in the late 19th
century and early 20th century).Like most languages of the world,
there is an increasing amount of
English vocabulary entering the Persian
language. The Persian academy (Farhangestan) has coined Persian
equivalents for some of these terms. There are more French loan
words than English loan words because Persian speakers more easily
pronounce French words.
Persian has likewise influenced the vocabularies of other
languages, especially other
Indo-Iranian languages like Urdu and
to a lesser extent Hindi, etc, as well as
Turkic languages like
Ottoman Turkish,
Chagatai language,
Tatar language,
Turkish,
Turkmen,
Azeri and
Uzbek, Afro-Asiatic languages like
Assyrian and
Arabic, and even
Dravidian languages especially
Telugu and
Brahui. Several languages of southwest Asia
have also been influenced, including
Armenian and
Georgian. Persian has even influenced the
Malay spoken in Malaysia and
Swahili in Africa. Many Persian words have
also found their way into other
Indo-European languages including the English
language.
Persian
language has had an influence on certain neighboring languages,
particularly the Turkic languages
of Central Asia, Caucasus, Pashto, Kurdish and Anatolia, the development of the Urdu
language, as well as a smaller influence on Hindi, Punjabi,
Saraiki and other South Asian
languages.
Use of occasional foreign synonyms instead of Persian words can be
a common practice in everyday communications as an alternative
expression. In some instances in addition to the Persian
vocabulary, the equivalent synonyms from multiple foreign languages
can be used. For example, the English phrase
thank you can
be expressed using the French word
Merci, Hybrid Persian
and Arabic word
Moteshaker-am, or Persian word
Sepasgozar-am.The extent of Persian words used in
Urdu has made that language often understandable by
Persian-speakers, especially in written form.
Orthography
Example showing 's (Persian)
proportion rules.
The vast majority of modern Iranian Persian and Dari text is
written in a form of the
Arabic
alphabet.
Tajik, which
is considered by some linguists to be a Persian dialect influenced
by Russian and the Turkic languages of Central
Asia, is written with the Cyrillic
alphabet in Tajikistan (see Tajik
alphabet).
Persian alphabet
Modern Iranian Persian and Dari are normally written using a
modified variant of the
Arabic
alphabet (see
Perso-Arabic
script) with different pronunciation and more letters, whereas
the Tajik variety is typically written in a modified version of the
Cyrillic alphabet.
After the conversion of
Persia to
Islam (see
Islamic conquest of Iran), it took
approximately 150 years before Persians adopted the Arabic alphabet
in place of the older alphabet. Previously, two different alphabets
were used,
Pahlavi, used for Middle
Persian, and the
Avestan alphabet
(in Persian, Dîndapirak or Din Dabire—literally: religion script),
used for religious purposes, primarily for the
Avestan language but sometimes for Middle
Persian.
In modern Persian script, vowels that are referred to as short
vowels (a, e, o) are usually not written; only the long vowels (i,
u, â) are represented in the text. This, of course, creates certain
ambiguities. Consider the following:
kerm "worm",
karam "generosity",
kerem "cream", and
krom "chrome" are all spelled "krm" in Persian. The reader
must determine the word from context. The Arabic system of
vocalization marks known as
harakat
is also used in Persian, although some of the symbols have
different pronunciations. For example, an Arabic
damma is pronounced , while in Iranian Persian it
is pronounced . This system is not used in mainstream Persian
literature; it is primarily used for teaching and in some (but not
all) dictionaries.
It is also worth noting that there are several letters generally
only used in Arabic loanwords. These letters are pronounced the
same as similar Persian letters. For example, there are four
functionally identical 'z' letters, three 's' letters, two 't'
letters, etc.
Additions
The
Persian alphabet adds four
letters to the Arabic alphabet:
| Sound |
Isolated form |
Name |
| [p] |
پ |
pe |
| (ch) |
چ |
če |
| (zh) |
ژ |
že |
| [g] |
گ |
gāf |
(The
že is pronounced with the same sound as the "s" in
"measure" and "fusion", or the "z" in "azure".)
Variations
The Persian alphabet also modifies some letters from the Arabic
alphabet. For example,
alef with hamza below
( إ ) changes to
alef
( ا ); words using various
hamzas
get spelled with yet another kind of hamza (so that مسؤول becomes
مسئول); and
teh marbuta
( ة ) changes to
heh
( ه ) or
teh
( ت ).
The letters different in shape are:
| Sound |
original Arabic letter |
modified Persian letter |
name |
| [k] |
ك |
ک |
kāf |
| vowel consonant |
ي |
ى |
ye |
Writing the letters in their original Arabic form is not typically
considered to be incorrect, but is not normally done.
Latin alphabet
The
International
Organization for Standardization has published a standard for
simplified
transliteration of
Persian into Latin,
ISO 233-3, titled
"Information and documentation -- Transliteration of Arabic
characters into Latin characters -- Part 3: Persian language --
Simplified transliteration" but the transliteration scheme is not
in widespread use.
Another
Latin alphabet, based on the Uniform Turkic alphabet, was used in
Tajikistan in the 1920s and 1930s. The alphabet was
phased out in favour of
Cyrillic in the late 1930s.
Fingilish, or Penglish, 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. The orthography is
not standardized, and varies among writers and even media (for
example, typing 'aa' for the phoneme is easier on computer
keyboards than on cellphone keyboards, resulting in smaller usage
of the combination on cellphones).
UniPers, short for the
Universal Persian
Alphabet (Pârsiye Jahâni) is a Latin-based alphabet
popularized by
Mohamed Keyvan, who
used it in a number of Persian textbooks for foreigners and
travellers.
The International Persian Alphabet (
Pársik) is another
Latin-based alphabet developed in recent years mainly by A.
Moslehi, a comparative linguist.
Tajik alphabet
The
Cyrillic alphabet was introduced
for writing the Tajik language under
the Tajik Soviet Socialist
Republic
in the late 1930s, replacing the Latin alphabet that had been used since
the Bolshevik revolution and
the Perso-Arabic script that had been used earlier. After
1939, materials published in Persian in the Perso-Arabic script
were banned from the country.
Examples
Article 1 of the
Universal Declaration of
Human Rights:
| Persian |
IPA |
English Gloss |
| همهٔ افراد بشر آزاد به دنیا میآیند و از دید حیثیت و
حقوق با هم برابرند، همه دارای اندیشه و وجدان هستند و باید در برابر
یکدیگر با روح برادری رفتار کنند. |
hæmeje æfrɒd bæʃær ɒzɒd be donjɒ miɒjænd o æz dide hejsijæt o
hoɢuɢ bɒ hæm bærɒbærænd ǁ hæme dɒrɒje ændiʃe o vedʒdɒn mibɒʃænd o
bɒjæd dær bærɒbære jekdigær bɒ ruhe bærɒdæri ræftɒr konænd |
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards
one another in a spirit of brotherhood. |
See also
Notes
- Richard Davis, “Persian” in Josef W. Meri, Jere L. Bacharach,
“Medieval Islamic Civilization”, Taylor & Francis, 2006. Ppg
602-603. “The grammar of New Persian is similar to many
contemporary European languages.” “Persian has in general confined
its borrowing from Arabic to lexical items, and its morphology is
relatively unaffected by the influence of Arabic, being confined to
a few conventions such as (usually original) use of Arabic plurals
for Arabic-derived words (as in English speaker may use Latin
plurals for Latin loan words, in English). Similarly, the core
vocabulary of Persian continued to be derived from Pahlavi, but
Arabic lexical items predominate for more abstract or abstruse
subjects and often replaced their Persian equivalents in polite
discourse.
- Professor. Gilbert Lazard, : The language known as New
Persian, which usually is called at this period (early Islamic
times) by the name of Dari or Parsi-Dari, can be classified
linguistically as a continuation of Middle Persian, the official
religious and literary language of Sassanian Iran, itself a
continuation of Old Persian, the language of the Achaemenids.
Unlike the other languages and dialects, ancient and modern, of the
Iranian group such as Avestan, Parthian, Soghdian, Kurdish, Balochi, Pashto, etc., Old
Middle and
New Persian represent one and the same language at three states of
its history. It had its origin in Fars (the true Persian country from the
historical point of view) and is differentiated by dialectical
features, still easily recognizable from the dialect prevailing in
north-western and eastern Iran in (Lazard, Gilbert 1975, “The
Rise of the New Persian Language” in Frye, R. N., The Cambridge
History of Iran, Vol. 4, pp. 595–632, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
- Lazard, Gilbert, "Pahlavi, Pârsi, dari: Les langues d'Iran
d'apès Ibn al-Muqaffa" in R.N. Frye, "Iran and Islam. In Memory of
the late Vladimir Minorsky", Edinburgh University Press, 1971.
- Ann K. S. Lambton, "Persian grammar", Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge University Press 1953. Excerpt: "The Arabic words
incorporated into the Persian language have become
Persianized".
- Oxford English Dictionary
online, s.v. "Persian", draft revision June 2007.
- Oxford English Dictionary
online, s.v. "Fārsi".
- Cannon, Garland Hampton and Kaye, Alan S. (1994) The Arabic
contributions to the English language: an historical
dictionary Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden, Germany, page 106,
ISBN 3-447-03491-2
- Odisho, Edward Y. (2005) Techniques of teaching comparative
pronunciation in Arabic and English Gorgias Press, Piscataway,
New Jersey, page 23 ISBN 1-59333-272-6
- For example: A. Gharib, M. Bahar, B. Fooroozanfar, J. Homaii,
and R. Yasami. Farsi Grammar. Jahane Danesh, 2nd edition,
2001.
- Pronouncement of the Academy of Persian Language and
Literature
- Documentation for ISO 639 identifier: fas
- Ethnologue: Code PRS
- Ethnologue: Code PES
- Linguist List: Tree for Southwest Western
Iranian
- Kamran Talattof Persian or Farsi? The debate
continues...
- cf. vi(2). Documentation. New Persian, is "the descendant of
Middle Persian" and has been "official language of Iranian states
for centuries", whereas for other non-Persian Iranian languages
"close genetic relationships are difficult to establish" between
their different (Middle and Modern) stages. Modern Yaḡnōbi belongs
to the same dialect group as Sogdian, but is not a direct
descendant; Bactrian may be closely related to modern Yidḡa and
Munji (Munjāni); and Wakhi (Wāḵi) belongs with Khotanese."
- John Andrew Boyle, Some thoughts on the sources for the
Il-Khanid period of Persian history, in Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian
Studies, British Institute of Persian Studies, vol. 12 (1974), p.
175.
- The Mughal economy was responsible for around 20-25 % of the
world economy, whereas the West-Asian productivity was less than
5%, see the List of regions by past
GDP .
- Persian or Farsi ? Simin Karimi, Department of
Linguistics, University of Arizona
- Henderson, M. M. T. (1994) "Modern Persian Verb Stems
Revisited" in Journal of the American Oriental Society,
Vol. 114, No. 4. (October–December 1994), pp. 639–641.
- Keshavarz, M. H. (1988) "Forms of Address in Post-Revolutionary
Iranian Persian: A Sociolinguistic Analysis" in Language in
Society, Vol. 17 No. 4 p565-75 December 1988
- Ethnologue - Language Family Trees -
Persian
- Perry, J. R. (2005) A Tajik Persian Reference Grammar
(Boston : Brill) ISBN 90-04-14323-8
- fareiran.com / فرايران
- John R. Perry, "Lexical Areas and Semantic Fields of Arabic" in
Éva Ágnes Csató, Eva Agnes Csato, Bo Isaksson, Carina
Jahani,"Linguistic convergence and areal diffusion: case studies
from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic",Routledge, 2005. pg 97: "It is
generally understood that the bulk of the Arabic vocabulary in the
central, contingous Iranic, Turkic and Indic languages was
originally borrowed into literary Persian between the ninth and
thirteenth century"
- John Perry, Encyclopedia Iranica, "ARABIC WORDS in ŠĀH-NĀMA
"
- John R. Perry, "Lexical Areas and Semantic Fields of Arabic" in
Éva Ágnes Csató, Eva Agnes Csato, Bo Isaksson, Carina
Jahani,"Linguistic convergence and areal diffusion: case studies
from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic",Routledge, 2005. excerpt:"A
dictionary based sample yields an inventory of approximately 8000
Arabic loanwords in current standard Persian or about forty percent
of an everyday literary vocabulary of 20,000 words, not counting
compounds and deravitives." excerpt: "In a random experiment, the
Arabic Vocabulary of material culture was 14% while that of
intellectual life was 24% percent in Persian." excerpt:"Most of the
Arabic loans in Persian are either synonyms of attested native
terms (as Arabic Mariz; Persian Bimar 'sick') or could be (and
often have been) glossed in Persian native morphs (as Arabic ta'lim
va tarbiyat 'education' was later replaced by Amuzesh o Parvaresh).
Arabic vocabulary in Persian is thus suppletive, rather than
basic."
- e.g. The role of Azeri-Turkish in Iranian Persian, on which see
John Perry, "The Historical Role of Turkish in Relation to Persian
of Iran", Iran & the Caucasus, Vol. 5 (2001), pp. 193-200.
- Xavier Planhol, "Land of Iran", Encyclopedia Iranica. "The
Turks, on the other hand, posed a formidable threat: their
penetration into Iranian lands was considerable, to such an extent
that vast regions adapted their language. This process was all the
more remarkable since, in spite of their almost uninterrupted
political domination for nearly 1,000 years, the cultural influence
of these rough nomads on Iran’s refined civilization remained
extremely tenuous. This is demonstrated by the mediocre linguistic
contribution, for which exhaustive statistical studies have been
made (Doerfer). The number of Turkish or Mongol words that entered
Persian, though not negligible, remained limited to 2,135, i.e., 3
percent of the vocabulary at the most. These new words are confined
on the one hand to the military and political sector (titles,
administration, etc.) and, on the other hand, to technical pastoral
terms. The contrast with Arab influence is striking. While cultural
pressure of the Arabs on Iran had been intense, they in no way
infringed upon the entire Iranian territory, whereas with the
Turks, whose contributions to Iranian civilization were modest,
vast regions of Iranian lands were assimilated, notwithstanding the
fact that resistance by the latter was ultimately victorious.
Several reasons may be offered.”
- Majd,
Hooman. "Persian Cats." The Ayatollah Begs to Differ.
2008. Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-52334-9. 33.
- Andreas Tietze, Persian loanwords in Anatolian Turkish, Oriens,
20 (1967) pp- 125-168. [1]
- L. Johanson, "Azerbaijan: Iranian Elements in Azeri Turkish" in
Encycloopedia Iranica [2]
- Bashgah
- ISO 233-3:1999
- UniPers
- IPA2
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