LANGUAGE

OLD PERSIAN

Old Persian was contemporary to Avestan, another Old Iranian language. Old Persian is preserved through cuneiform tablets found in the remains after the Achaemenid dynasty (550- 330 BCE). The oldest traces of Old Persian date to the 6th century BCE, but it was spoken until the 3rd century BCE.
Old Persian was spoken in southwestern Iran, while Avestan was spoken in northeastern Iran. In addition to the two languages there must have been at least a third. Median is mentioned by the Greek historian Herodotus.
It is believed that there must have been a fair level of mutual intelligibility between the Iranian languages of this period, and more than there would be in later periods.

MIDDLE PERSIAN

Middle Persian was a contemporary of Parthian, and during the Arsacid period, Persian was strongly influenced by Parthian. Middle Persian was the language used in the Sassanian Empire, and was called Pahlavi.
Middle Persian was, just like Old Persian, spoken in southwestern Iran, Parthian was spoken in the north, while a group of languages (Khwarezmian, Sogdian and Saka) were spoken in southeast.
The grammar of Middle Persian was simpler than in Old Persian. The script used was one of ambiguous script with multivalent letters, derived from Aramaic.
Middle Persian would last until the 9th century CE, even if its decline came with the introduction of Arabic already two centuries earlier.

MODERN PERSIAN

Modern Persian, the language of Iran today, was developed as early as in the 9th century. It was in many fields a continuation of Middle Persian, but there were important influences coming from other Iranian languages.
Modern Persian used an expanded form of Arabic writing, introducing letters like ch, p, zh, g, and changing the pronunciation of Arabic zh into "za". There is also a large selection of Arabic words in Modern Persian, exceeding 40%.
The grammar of Modern Persian is simpler than the one of Middle Persian (just like Middle was simpler than Old Persian). Most of the inflectional systems are lost, and there is no system of case inflection. Possession is shown by a suffix called ezafeh. Tense, mood, voice and negative are likewise indicated by a series of prefixes and infixes (word elements inserted inside a word).

The grammatical structure of modern Persian is very close to that of Dari. The number of vowels has reduced from 8 in Dari Persian to 6 . The vocabulary has gone through a tremendous upheaval. Many old and pure Persian words have been abandoned and given way to foreign borrowed words. These foreign languages include Arabic, Turkish, Mongolian, and more recently French and English.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the three versions of the modern Persian spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikestan have been on increasingly divergent paths. Russian words have enteredTajiki Persian, and Pashto words have been introduced into the Persian language spoken in Afghanistan.

Efforts have been made off and on in Iran, since the 1920's, to purify the Persian language by reintroducing abandoned words and inventing new ones. The results have been mixed. Much more needs to be accomplished. One of the great projects brought forth in this site is the commitment to reinvigorate this noble cause. To find out more, Persian is written in the Arabic script with 4 additional letters (p, c, g, �). This alphabet is also known as, Perso-Arabic. In the 19th century, and then again in the 1920's, unsuccessful attempts were made to simplify Perso-Arabic or replace it with a Latin-based alphabet. The Perso-Arabic alphabet has many basic shortcomings. In order to find a problems, scholars and enthusiasts have recently revived the commitment to introduce alternate alphabets for Persian.

WRITING SYSTEM

Persian is a synonym for Farsi, and they both refer to an Indo-European language that was spoken in the old Persian Empire. It is spoken in today's Iran, parts of Afghanistan, and parts of the old southern Soviet states such as Tajikestan. There are numerous dialects of Persian language, such as Dari, Gilaki, etc. The standard and modern Farsi is spoken in today's Iran.

Persian alphabet has 32 letters (as compared to 28 in Arabic and 26 in English) and is written from right to left. Some of the letters can be connected to from both left and right and some can only be connected from right. Therefore, each letter may have two or three different shapes based on connectivity and its occurence at the beginning, middle or the end of a word. It means that memorizing less than 100 visual icons is sufficient to read and write Persian words.

As compared to latin scripts, there is no limitation on the width of the letters and this brings a great variability in form and writing style. Letters can be expanded, curved and angled to fit the width.

Many have an image that Persian and Arabic alphabet are the same. Persian alphabet includes but not restricted to Arabic letters. Arabic alphabet belongs to the group of Semitic scripts in which the consonants are actually written and vowels are placed in between the lines. Arabic script is derived from the Aramic Nabataean alphabet and has 28 letters derived from 18 shapes, distinguished by one (10 cases) or two dots (3 cases) placed above or below the letter or three dots place above the letter only (2 cases).
Persian has 32 letters derived from 18 shapes. Letters are distinguished by one (10 cases), two (3 cases) or three dots (5 cases) placed above or below the letter. Three long vowels, AA, EE and OO are also represented by letters. Short vowels for A, E and O have no letters and may be shown by small diagonal underbar stroke (for E) and overbar stroke (for A) or small comma (for O).
Again many people have a wrong image that Persian and Arabic scripts are the same. There are six script styles, named Shesh Ghalam:
Nasta-ligh (Farsi), Kufi, Deewani, Naskh, Req'aa and Thuluth.
The most common Persian script is called Nasta-ligh, that is a lighter and much more elegant version of Taligh or hanging script. The basic rules of Nasta-ligh were developped over centuries and were revised in the Safavi (~1500 A.D.) period. Nasta-ligh is different from Naskh which is common in Arabic, roughly, due to shape of letters and style of writing.
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