Persian (local names: فارسی
, Fārsi or پارسی
, Pārsi; see
Nomenclature) is an
Indo-European
language spoken in
Iran,
Afghanistan,
Tajikistan and
Uzbekistan. It is derived from the language of the ancient
Persian people.
Persian and its varieties have official-language status in
Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. According to
CIA World Factbook, based on old data, there are
approximately 62 million native speakers of Persian in
Iran,[2]
Afghanistan,[3]
Tajikistan[4]
and
Uzbekistan[5]
and about the same number of people in other parts of the world
speak Persian.
UNESCO was asked to select Persian as one of its languages
in 2006.[6]
Persian has been a medium for literary and scientific
contributions to the
Islamic world as well as the Western. It has had an
influence on certain neighbouring languages, particularly the
Turkic languages of
Central Asia,
Caucasus, and
Anatolia. It has had a lesser influence on
Arabic and other languages of
Mesopotamia.
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
India
and became the "official language" under the
Mughal emperors. Only in 1843 did the subcontinent begin
conducting business in English.[7]
Evidence of Persian's historical influence in the region can be
seen in the extent of its influence on the languages of
Hindustani (resulting in
Urdu),
Kashmiri,
Punjabi,
Sindhi,
Gujarati,
Bengali and even
Telugu, as well as the popularity that
Persian literature still enjoys in the region.
Classification
Persian belongs to the
Western group of the
Indo-Iranian branch of the
Indo-European language family, and is of the
Subject Object Verb type. Contrary to common belief, it is
not a Semitic language. The Western Indo-Iranian group contains
other related languages such as
Kurdish and
Balochi. The language is in the
Southwestern Indo-Iranian group, along with the
Tat and
Luri languages.
Local names
The Persian language is locally known as
- فارسی (transliteration:
Fārsi)
or پارسی (Pārsi),
local name in Iran, Afghanistan (where it is officially
known as Darī) and Tajikistan,
-
Tajik, local name in
Central Asia.
-
Dari, name given to classical Persian poetry and
court language, as well as to Persian dialects spoken in
Afghanistan,
Tajikistan.
Nomenclature
Persian, the more widely used name of the language in
English, is an Anglicized form derived from
Latin
*Persianus < Latin
Persia <
Greek Πέρσις Pérsis,
a
Hellenized form of Old Persian
Parsa.
According to the
Oxford English Dictionary, the term Persian seems to have
been first used in English in the mid-16th century.[9]
Native Persian speakers call it "Fārsi" (local name). Farsi
is the
arabicized form of Parsi, due to a lack of the /p/ phoneme
in Standard Arabic.
According to
Pejman Akbarzadeh, "... In English, however, this language
has always been known as "Persian" ('Persane' in French and
'Persisch' in German). But many Persians migrating to the West
(particularly to the USA) after the 1979 revolution continued to
use 'Farsi' to identify their language in English and the word
became commonplace in English-speaking countries."[10]
"Farsi" is encountered frequently in the linguistic literature
as a name for the language, used both by Iranian and by foreign
authors,[11]
and is preferred by some.[12]
However, The
Academy of Persian Language and Literature has declared in
an official pronouncement[13]
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.
The international language encoding standard
ISO 639-1 uses the code "fa", as its coding system is 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).[14]
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.[15][16]
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".[17]
Currently,
VOA,
BBC,
DW, and
RFE/RL use "Persian Service", in lieu of "Farsi Service".
RFE/RL also includes a Tajik service, and 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.[18]
Dialects and close languages
|
Persian
language |
History
Dialects
-
Writing systems
|
There are three modern varieties for the standard Persian:
The three mentioned varieties are based on the classic
Persian literature. There are also several local dialects in
Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan which slightly differ from the
standard Persian.
Lari (in Iran),
Hazaragi (in Afghanistan), and
Darwazi (In Afghanistan and Tajikistan) are examples of
these dialects.
The
Ethnologue offers another classification for dialects of
Persian language. According to this source, dialects of this
language include the following:[21]
The following are some of the related languages of various
ethnic groups within the borders of modern-day Iran:
Phonology
-
Iranian Persian has six vowels and twenty-three consonants,
including two affricates
/ʧ/ (ch) and
/ʤ/ (j).
Vowels
Historically, Persian distinguished length: the long vowels
/iː/,
/uː/,
/ɒː/ contrasting with the short vowels
/e/,
/o/,
/æ/ respectively. Persian dialects and varieties differ
in their vowels, more so than in their consonants.
Consonants
Grammar
Morphology
Suffixes predominate Persian morphology, though there are a
small number of prefixes.[22]
Verbs can express tense and aspect, and they agree with the
subject in person and number.[23]
There is no
grammatical gender for nouns, 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 rɑ: and precedes
prepositional phrases: “(S) (O + “rɑ:”)
(PP) V”.[23]
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.[24]
External influence
There are many
loanwords in the Persian language, mostly coming from
Arabic, but also from
English,
French,
German, and the
Turkic languages.
Persian has likewise influenced the vocabularies of other
languages, especially other
Indo-Iranian languages like
Hindi,
Urdu,
Marathi, etc, as well as
Turkic languages like
Turkish and
Uzbek, Afro-Asiatic languages like
Assyrian and
Arabic[25],
and even Dravidian languages especially
Telugu and
Brahui[citation
needed]. 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[citation
needed]. Many Persian words have also found
their way into European languages including the English
language.
The extent of Persian words in use in such languages like
Urdu
&
Turkish, has made these languages often understandable by
Persian-speakers, especially in written form.[citation
needed]
See also:
List of English words of Persian origin and
Comparison Table of the Iranian Languages
Orthography
The vast majority of modern Iranian Persian and Dari text is
written in a form of the
Arabic alphabet. In recent years the
Latin alphabet has been used by some for technological or
internationalisation reasons.
Tajik, which is considered by some linguists to be a Persian
dialect influenced by
Russian and the
Turkic languages of Central Asia,[26][27]
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 as a replacement for
the older alphabet. Previously, two different alphabets were
used, one for Middle Persian and one for Avestan, used for
religious purposes, known as the
Avestan alphabet (in Persian, Dîndapirak or Din
Dabire—literally: religion script).
In modern Persian script, vowels generally known as short
vowels (a, e, o) are usually not written; only the long vowels
(y, 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. It is worth noting that 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 /u/, while in Iranian Persian it is pronounced
/o/. 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 considered by native Persian speakers to be 'Arabic'
despite the fact that these letters are present in the Persian
alphabet. While the letters exist, the Arabic pronunciation of
these letters is not generally used. Instead, they are
pronounced the same as a similar Persian letter. As such, there
are three 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 |
Unicode name |
| [p] |
پ |
Peh |
|
[tʃ] (ch) |
چ |
Cheh |
|
[ʒ] (zh) |
ژ |
Jeh |
| [g] |
گ |
Gaf |
(The Jeh sound is pronounced as in "measure",
"fusion", or "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 ) usually, but not always, changes to
heh ( ه ) or
teh ( ت ). Teh'marbuta is often used in Arabic to denote
female gender. Persian nouns do not have gender, which may
explain why the teh'marbuta never crossed over to the Persian
alphabet.
The letters different in shape are:
| Sound |
original Arabic letter |
modified Persian letter |
name |
| [k] |
ك |
ک |
Kaf |
| [j] (y) and
[iː], or rarely
[ɑː] |
ي or ى |
ى |
Yeh |
Writing the letters in their original Arabic form is not
typically considered to be incorrect, but is not normally done.
Latin alphabet
UniPers, short for the Universal Persian Alphabet
(Pârsiye Jahâni) is a Latin-based alphabet created and
popularized by
Mohamed Keyvan, who used it in a number of Persian textbooks
for foreigners and travellers.[28]
The International Persian Alphabet (Pársik) is another
Latin-based alphabet developed in recent years mainly by A.
Moslehi, a comparative linguist.[29]
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.[26]
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 [ɒ] phoneme is easier on computer keyboards than on
cellphone keyboards, resulting in smaller usage of the
combination on cellphones).
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.[26]
History
Persian is an Iranian tongue belonging to the
Indo-Iranian branch of the
Indo-European family of languages. The oldest records in
Old Persian date back to the great Persian Empire of the 6th
century BC.[30]
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 BCE - ca. 486 BCE). 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, plural, dual.
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, and was thus much simpler
than its ancestor. The complex
conjugation and
declension of Old Persian yielded to a simple internal
structure of Middle Persian; the dual number disappeared,
leaving only singular and plural, as did gender. Instead, Middle
Persian used prepositions 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 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.
Modern Persian
Early Modern Persian
Classic Persian
The
Islamic conquest of Persia marks the beginning of the modern
history of Persian language and literature. It is known as the
golden era of Persian. It saw world-famous 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, the
Mughal Empires,
Timurids,
Ghaznavid,
Seljuq,
Safavid,
Ottomans, etc. 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 borrow many words and structures from
Arabic and as the time went by, a few words were borrowed
from
Mongolian under the Mongolian empire.
Contemporary Persian
Since the nineteenth century,
Russian,
French and
English and many other languages 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. Due to technological
developments, new words and idioms are created and enter into
Persian as they do into any other language.
Examples
| Persian |
Romanisation |
Gloss |
| همهی افراد بشر آزاد به دنیا میآیند و از دید حیثیت
و حقوق با هم برابرند, همه دارای اندیشه و وجدان میباشند
و باید دربرابر یکدیگر با روح برادری رفتار کنند. |
Hameye afrâde bašar âzâd be donyâ miyâyand va az
dide heysiyat o hoquq bâ ham barâbarand. Hame dârâye
andisheh o vejdân mibâšand va bâyad dar barabare
yekdigar bâ ruhe barâdari raftâr konand. |
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. |
فارسی