Persian alphabet
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The Persian alphabet (Persian: الفبای فارسی, romanized: Alefbâ-ye Fârsi), also known as the Perso-Arabic script, is the right-to-left alphabet used for the Persian language. This is like the Arabic script with four additional letters: پ چ ژ گ (the sounds 'g', 'zh', 'ch', and 'p', respectively), in addition to the obsolete ڤ that was used for the sound /β/. This letter is no longer used in Persian, as the [β]-sound changed to [b], e.g. archaic زڤان /zaβɑn/ > زبان /zæbɒn/ 'language'. Although the sound /β/ (ڤ) is written as "و" nowadays in Farsi (Dari-Parsi/New Persian), it is different to the Arabic /w/ (و) sound, which uses the same letter.
| Persian alphabet الفبای فارسی Alefbâ-ye Fârsi | |
|---|---|
 A page from a 12th century manuscript of "Kitab al-Abniya 'an Haqa'iq al-Adwiya" by Abu Mansur Muwaffaq with special Persian letters p (پ), ch (چ) and g (گ = ڭـ). | |
| Script type | Abjad |
Period | c. 7th century CE – present |
| Direction | Right-to-left script  |
| Languages | Persian, Mazanderani,Moghol, Qashqai |
| Related scripts | |
Parent systems | Egyptian hieroglyphs
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Child systems |
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| This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. | |
It was the basis of many Arabic-based scripts used in Central and South Asia. It is used for both Iranian and Dari: standard varieties of Persian; and is one of two official writing systems for the Persian language, alongside the Cyrillic-based Tajik alphabet.
The script is mostly but not exclusively right-to-left; mathematical expressions, numeric dates and numbers bearing units are embedded from left to right. The script is cursive, meaning most letters in a word connect to each other; when they are typed, contemporary word processors automatically join adjacent letter forms. Persian is unusual among Arabic scripts because a zero-width non-joiner is sometimes entered in a word, causing a letter to become disconnected from others in the same word.
History
The Persian alphabet is directly derived and developed from the Arabic alphabet. The Arabic alphabet was introduced to the Persian-speaking world after the Muslim conquest of Persia and the fall of the Sasanian Empire in the 7th century. Following this, the Arabic language became the principal language of government and religious institutions in Persia, which led to the widespread usage of the Arabic script. Classical Persian literature and poetry were affected by this simultaneous usage of Arabic and Persian. A new influx of Arabic vocabulary soon entered the Persian language. In the 8th century, the Tahirid dynasty and Samanid dynasty officially adopted the Arabic script for writing Persian, followed by the Saffarid dynasty in the 9th century, gradually displacing the various Pahlavi scripts used for the Persian language earlier. By the 9th-century, the Perso-Arabic alphabet became the dominant form of writing in Greater Khorasan.
Under the influence of various Persian Empires, many languages in Central and South Asia that adopted the Arabic script use the Persian Alphabet as the basis of their writing systems. Today, extended versions of the Persian alphabet are used to write a wide variety of Indo-Iranian languages, including Kurdish, Balochi, Pashto, Urdu (from Classical Hindustani), Saraiki, Panjabi, Sindhi and Kashmiri. In the past the use of the Persian alphabet was common amongst Turkic languages, but today is relegated to those spoken within Iran, such as Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Qashqai, Chaharmahali and Khalaj. The Uyghur language in western China is the most notable exception to this.
During the Soviet period many languages in Central Asia, including Persian, were reformed by the government. This ultimately resulted in the Cyrillic-based alphabet used in Tajikistan today. See: Tajik alphabet § History.
Letters
Below are the 32 letters of the modern Persian alphabet. Since the script is cursive, the appearance of a letter changes depending on its position: isolated, initial (joined on the left), medial (joined on both sides) and final (joined on the right) of a word. These include 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet, in addition to 4 other letters.
The names of the letters are mostly the ones used in Arabic except for the Persian pronunciation. The only ambiguous name is he, which is used for both ح and ه. For clarification, they are often called hâ-ye jimi (literally "jim-like he" after jim, the name for the letter ج that uses the same base form) and hâ-ye do-češm (literally "two-eyed he", after the contextual middle letterform ـهـ), respectively. There are eight Persian letters that are mainly used in Arabic or foreign loanwords and not in native words: ث, ح, ذ, ص, ض, ط, ظ, ع and غ. These eight letters are also common used in proper names only. Unlike Arabic, the Persian language does not have pharyngealization at all. Although the letter غ is mainly used in Arabic loanwords, there are some native Persian words with this letter: آغاز, زغال, etc. The pronunciation of these letters in Persian can differ from their pronunciation in Arabic. For example, the letter ث is pronounced as /s/ in Persian, while it is pronounced as /θ/ in Arabic.
| Letter | Persian | Arabic |
|---|---|---|
| ث | /s/ | /θ/ |
| ح | /h/ | /ħ/ |
| ذ | /z/ | /ð/ |
| ص | /s/ | /sˤ/ |
| ض | /z/ | /dˤ/ |
| ط | /t/ | /tˤ/ |
| ظ | /z/ | /ðˤ/ |
| ع | /ʔ/ | /ʕ/ |
| غ | [ɢ] or [ɣ] | /ɣ/ |
- Many Perso-Arabic scripts in South Asia share close similarities (use of Nastaliq, use of superscript ط to represent retroflex consonants, etc.) due to mutual contact during development. It is inaccurate to say that one Indo-Persian script directly descends from another, and instead, they are best seen as a cluster of scripts with common origin.
- However, the Arabic variant continues to be used in its traditional style in the Nile Valley, similarly as it is used in Persian and Ottoman Turkish.
Comparison of different numerals
| Western Arabic | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | |
| Eastern Arabic | ٠ | ١ | ٢ | ٣ | ٤ | ٥ | ٦ | ٧ | ٨ | ٩ | ١٠ |
| Persian | ۰ | ۱ | ۲ | ۳ | ۴ | ۵ | ۶ | ۷ | ۸ | ۹ | ۱۰ |
| Urdu | ۰ | ۱ | ۲ | ۳ | ۴ | ۵ | ۶ | ۷ | ۸ | ۹ | ۱۰ |
| Abjad numerals | ا | ب | ج | د | ه | و | ز | ح | ط | ي |
- U+0660 through U+0669
- U+06F0 through U+06F9. The numbers 4, 5, and 6 are different from Eastern Arabic.
- Same Unicode characters as the Persian, but language is set to Urdu. The numerals 4, 6 and 7 are different from Persian. On some devices, this row may appear identical to Persian.
Word boundaries
Typically, words are separated from each other by a space. Certain morphemes (such as the plural ending '-hâ'), however, are written without a space. On a computer, they are separated from the word using the zero-width non-joiner.
Cyrillic Persian alphabet in Tajikistan
As part of the russification of Central Asia, the Cyrillic script was introduced in the late 1930s. The alphabet has remained Cyrillic since then. In 1989, with the growth in Tajik nationalism, a law was enacted declaring Tajik the state language. In addition, the law officially equated Tajik with Persian, placing the word Farsi (the endonym for the Persian language) after Tajik. The law also called for a gradual reintroduction of the Perso-Arabic alphabet.[excessive citations]
The Persian alphabet was introduced into education and public life, although the banning of the Islamic Renaissance Party in 1993 slowed adoption. In 1999, the word Farsi was removed from the state-language law, reverting the name to simply Tajik.[1] As of 2004[update] the de facto standard in use is the Tajik Cyrillic alphabet,[2] and as of 1996[update] only a very small part of the population can read the Persian alphabet.[3]
See also
- Scripts used for Persian
- Romanization of Persian
- Persian braille
- Persian phonology
- Abjad numerals
- Nastaʿlīq, the calligraphy used to write Persian before the 20th century
References
- "THE ARABI - MALAYALAM SCRIPTURE". 2008-03-18. Archived from the original on 18 March 2008. Retrieved 2023-01-11.
- "PERSIAN LANGUAGE i. Early New Persian". Iranica Online. Retrieved 18 March 2019.
- Orsatti, Paola (2019). "Persian Language in Arabic Script: The Formation of the Orthographic Standard and the Different Graphic Traditions of Iran in the First Centuries of the Islamic Era". Creating Standards (Book).
- Lapidus, Ira M. (2012). Islamic Societies to the Nineteenth Century: A Global History. Cambridge University Press. p. 256. ISBN 978-0-521-51441-5.
- Lapidus, Ira M. (2002). A History of Islamic Societies. Cambridge University Press. p. 127. ISBN 978-0-521-77933-3.
- Ager, Simon. "Persian (Fārsī / فارسی)". Omniglot.
- "ویژگىهاى خطّ فارسى". Academy of Persian Language and Literature. Archived from the original on 2017-09-07. Retrieved 2017-08-05.
- "??" (PDF). Persianacademy.ir. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-09-24. Retrieved 2015-09-05.
- "PERSIAN LANGUAGE i. Early New Persian". Iranica Online. Retrieved 18 March 2019.
- "Miscellaneous Symbols". p. 4. The Unicode Standard, Version 13.0. Unicode.org
- "3.8 Block-by-block Charts" § Miscellaneous Dingbats p. 325 (155 electronically). The Unicode Standard Version 1.0. Unicode.org
- For the proposal, see Pournader, Roozbeh (2001-09-20). "Proposal to add Arabic Currency Sign Rial to the UCS" (PDF). It proposes the character under the name of ARABIC CURRENCY SIGN RIAL, which was changed by the standard committees to RIAL SIGN.
- "Unicode Characters in the 'Number, Decimal Digit' Category".
- Hämmerle, Christa (2008). Gender Politics in Central Asia: Historical Perspectives and Current Living Conditions of Women. Böhlau Verlag Köln Weimar. ISBN 978-3-412-20140-1.
- Cavendish, Marshall (September 2006). World and Its Peoples. Marshall Cavendish. ISBN 978-0-7614-7571-2.
- Landau, Jacob M.; Landau, Yaʿaqov M.; Kellner-Heinkele, Barbara (2001). Politics of Language in the Ex-Soviet Muslim States: Azerbayjan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-11226-5.
- Buyers, Lydia M. (2003). Central Asia in Focus: Political and Economic Issues. Nova Publishers. ISBN 978-1-59033-153-8.
- Ehteshami, Anoushiravan (1994). From the Gulf to Central Asia: Players in the New Great Game. University of Exeter Press. ISBN 978-0-85989-451-7.
- Malik, Hafeez (1996). Central Asia: Its Strategic Importance and Future Prospects. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-0-312-16452-2.
- Banuazizi, Ali; Weiner, Myron (1994). The New Geopolitics of Central Asia and Its Borderlands. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-20918-4.
- Westerlund, David; Svanberg, Ingvar (1999). Islam Outside the Arab World. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-0-312-22691-6.
- Gillespie, Kate; Henry, Clement M. (1995). Oil in the New World Order. University Press of Florida. ISBN 978-0-8130-1367-1.
- Badan, Phool (2001). Dynamics of Political Development in Central Asia. Lancers' Books.
- Winrow, Gareth M. (1995). Turkey in Post-Soviet Central Asia. Royal Institute of International Affairs. ISBN 978-0-905031-99-6.
- Parsons, Anthony (1993). Central Asia, the Last Decolonization. David Davies Memorial Institute.
- Report on the USSR. RFE/RL, Incorporated. 1990.
- Middle East Monitor. Middle East Institute. 1990.
- Ochsenwald, William; Fisher, Sydney Nettleton (2010-01-06). The Middle East: A History. McGraw-Hill Education. ISBN 978-0-07-338562-4.
- Gall, Timothy L.; Hobby, Jeneen (2009). Worldmark Encyclopedia of Cultures and Daily Life. Gale. ISBN 978-1-4144-4892-3.
External links
- Dastoore khat – The Official document in Persian by Academy of Persian Language and Literature
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