Persian language

Persian (فارسی), also known as Farsi, Parsi, or Dari, is a language spoken in Iran, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. It has over 46 million native speakers. It belongs to the Indo-European language family. It 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, within which, the Iranian sub-branch consists of the following chronological linguistic path: Old Persian (Avestan and Achaemenids Persian) ==> Middle Persian (Pahlavi -- Parthian and Sassanids Persian) ==> Modern Persian (Modern Persian starts approximately around 900 CE to present).

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 Iran the Academy of Persian Language and Literature is a center that evaluates the new words in order to initiate and advise its Persian equivalent. In Afghanistan, the Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan does the same for Afghan Persian (among other languages).

Nomenclature

Persian, the more widely recognized name in English, is the Hellenized form of the native term Parsi. Farsi is the Arabicized form and its use in the English language is very recent. Native Iranians and Afghans typically call it "Farsi" in modern usage. ISO, the Academy of Persian Language and Literature, and many other authentic sources call the language "Persian". The government of Afghanistan uses both "Dari" and "Persian" in English communications.

Many people (including linguists and lexicographers) argue that "Farsi" is not the appropriate term used for the Persian language in English. "Farsi" is actually the arabized form of "Parsi", due to a lack of the /p/ phoneme in Standard Arabic [1] . Incidentally the Persian Wikipedia is sometimes referred to as the Farsi Wikipedia, as the "fa." prefix implies, due to the fact that "fa" is the ISO designation for the Persian langauge (de/German, es/Spanish, etc.)

Dialects

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

• Dari is an eastern dialect of Persian, one of the two official languages of Afghanistan.
• Tajik could also be considered an eastern dialect of Persian, but contrary to Iranian and Afghan Persian, is written in the Cyrillic script.
• Judeo-Persian was a language spoken by Jews in Persia.

Orthography

Modern Persian uses a modified version of the Arabic alphabet (see below). After conversion of Persia to Islam, it took a time span of approximately 150 years before Persians adopted the Arabic alphabet as a replacement for the older alphabet. Previously, the Persian language (the Middle Persian or Pahlavi at that time) used two different alphabets for written languages: A modified version of the Aramaic alphabet, and a native Iranian alphabet called Dîndapirak (literally: religion script).

It should be noted that human languages, and the alphabet used to represent those languages in written form, are two different concepts and alphabets are not intrinsic to human languages. As such, Persian and Arabic are two entirely different languages from different linguistic families, with different phonology and grammar.

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

The letters different in shape are:

The diacratical 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's pronounced as /o/.

Persian also adds the notion of a psuedo-space to the Arabic script, called a Zero Width Non-Joiner (ZWNJ) by the Unicode Standard. It acts like an space in disconnecting two otherwise-joining adjacent letters, but doesn't have a visual width.

It should also be noted that many Persian words with an Arabic root are spelled differently than 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 (like مسؤول becoming مسئول).

Other languages, like Pashto or Urdu have taken those notions and have sometimes extended them with new letters or punctuation.

Phonology

The functional contrast for vowels appears to be between long {/i:/, /u:/, /ɑ:/} and short {/e/, /o/, /æ/}. Therefore, it seems possible to represent the vowels as {/i:/, /u:/, /a:/} and {/i/, /u/, /a/}. Also note that /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ are affricates, not stops. The following chart is adapted from this Structural Sketch of Persian . Certain fonts may be needed to view phonetic characters.

Syntax

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