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96-447: Shahbanu ( Persian : شهبانو , romanized : Šahbānū , lit. ' lady king ' ) was the title for empress regnant or empress consort in Persian and other Iranian languages . The two Sassanian empresses regnant, Boran and Azarmidokht , c. 630 , were the last two that carried the title before Farah Pahlavi , the wife of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi ,
192-473: A y or v, as in Semitic: 𐎮𐎡𐎹 dī, 𐎯𐎢𐎺 dū. Diphthongs are written by mismatching consonant and vowel: 𐎭𐎡 dai , or sometimes, in cases where the consonant does not differentiate between vowels, by writing the consonant and both vowel components: 𐎨𐎡𐏁𐎱𐎠𐎡𐏁 cišpaiš (gen. of name Cišpi- ' Teispes '). In addition, three consonants, t , n , and r , are partially syllabic, having
288-655: A Dari dialect. In the 19th century, under the Qajar dynasty , the dialect that is spoken in Tehran rose to prominence. There was still substantial Arabic vocabulary, but many of these words have been integrated into Persian phonology and grammar. In addition, under the Qajar rule, numerous Russian , French , and English terms entered the Persian language, especially vocabulary related to technology. The first official attentions to
384-418: A dictionary called Words of Scientific Association ( لغت انجمن علمی ), which was completed in the future and renamed Katouzian Dictionary ( فرهنگ کاتوزیان ). The first academy for the Persian language was founded on 20 May 1935, under the name Academy of Iran . It was established by the initiative of Reza Shah Pahlavi , and mainly by Hekmat e Shirazi and Mohammad Ali Foroughi , all prominent names in
480-505: A language name is first attested in English in the mid-16th century. Farsi , which is the Persian word for the Persian language, has also been used widely in English in recent decades, more often to refer to Iran's standard Persian. However, the name Persian is still more widely used. The Academy of Persian Language and Literature has maintained that the endonym Farsi is to be avoided in foreign languages, and that Persian
576-417: A literary language considerably different from the spoken Persian of the time. This became the basis of what is now known as "Contemporary Standard Persian". There are three standard varieties of modern Persian: All these three varieties are based on the classic Persian literature and its literary tradition. There are also several local dialects from Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan which slightly differ from
672-483: A logo-syllabic prototype, all vowels but short /a/ are written and so the system is essentially an alphabet . There are three vowels, long and short. Initially, no distinction is made for length: 𐎠 a or ā, 𐎡 i or ī, 𐎢 u or ū. However, as in the Brahmic scripts, short a is not written after a consonant: 𐏃 h or ha, 𐏃𐎠 hā, 𐏃𐎡 hi or hī, 𐏃𐎢 hu or hū. (Old Persian
768-536: A period of several centuries, Ottoman Turkish (which was highly Persianised itself) had developed toward a fully accepted language of literature, and which was even able to lexically satisfy the demands of a scientific presentation. However, the number of Persian and Arabic loanwords contained in those works increased at times up to 88%. In the Ottoman Empire, Persian was used at the royal court, for diplomacy, poetry, historiographical works, literary works, and
864-599: A speaker of Persian. Persian is a member of the Western Iranian group of the Iranian languages , which make up a branch of the Indo-European languages in their Indo-Iranian subdivision . The Western Iranian languages themselves are divided into two subgroups: Southwestern Iranian languages, of which Persian is the most widely spoken, and Northwestern Iranian languages, of which Kurdish and Balochi are
960-615: Is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages . Persian is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken and used officially within Iran , Afghanistan , and Tajikistan in three mutually intelligible standard varieties , respectively Iranian Persian (officially known as Persian ), Dari Persian (officially known as Dari since 1964), and Tajiki Persian (officially known as Tajik since 1999). It
1056-664: Is a continuation of Middle Persian , an official language of the Sasanian Empire (224–651 CE), itself a continuation of Old Persian , which was used in the Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BCE). It originated in the region of Fars ( Persia ) in southwestern Iran. Its grammar is similar to that of many European languages. Throughout history, Persian was considered prestigious by various empires centered in West Asia , Central Asia , and South Asia . Old Persian
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#17328020992881152-628: Is a direct descendant of Middle and Old Persian. Gernot Windfuhr considers new Persian as an evolution of the Old Persian language and the Middle Persian language but also states that none of the known Middle Persian dialects is the direct predecessor of Modern Persian. Ludwig Paul states: "The language of the Shahnameh should be seen as one instance of continuous historical development from Middle to New Persian." The known history of
1248-796: Is also spoken natively in the Tajik variety by a significant population within Uzbekistan , as well as within other regions with a Persianate history in the cultural sphere of Greater Iran . It is written officially within Iran and Afghanistan in the Persian alphabet , a derivative of the Arabic script , and within Tajikistan in the Tajik alphabet , a derivative of the Cyrillic script . Modern Persian
1344-675: Is attested in Old Persian cuneiform on inscriptions from between the 6th and 4th century BC. Middle Persian is attested in Aramaic -derived scripts ( Pahlavi and Manichaean ) on inscriptions and in Zoroastrian and Manichaean scriptures from between the third to the tenth centuries (see Middle Persian literature ). New Persian literature was first recorded in the ninth century, after the Muslim conquest of Persia , since then adopting
1440-425: Is conventionally divided into three stages: Early New Persian remains largely intelligible to speakers of Contemporary Persian, as the morphology and, to a lesser extent, the lexicon of the language have remained relatively stable. New Persian texts written in the Arabic script first appear in the 9th-century. The language is a direct descendant of Middle Persian, the official, religious, and literary language of
1536-513: Is customarily done internationally for titleholders associated with abolished monarchies , but the title is no longer valid in Iran. According to the Persian Constitution of 1906 , Yasmine Pahlavi would currently hold this title. Persian language Russia Persian ( / ˈ p ɜːr ʒ ən , - ʃ ən / PUR -zhən, -shən ), also known by its endonym Farsi ( فارسی , Fārsī [fɒːɾˈsiː] ),
1632-454: Is more accurate to say that some of the Old Persian consonants are written by different letters depending on the following vowel, rather than classifying the script as syllabic. This situation had its origin in Assyrian cuneiform , where several syllabic distinctions had been lost and were often clarified with explicit vowels. However, in the case of Assyrian, the vowel was not always used, and
1728-460: Is not actually attested until 600 years later when it appears in the Sassanid era (224–651 AD) 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, in the 6th or 7th century. From the 8th century onward, Middle Persian gradually began yielding to New Persian, with
1824-649: Is not considered an abugida because vowels are represented as full letters.) Thirteen out of twenty-two consonants, such as 𐏃 h(a), are invariant, regardless of the following vowel (that is, they are alphabetic), while only six have a distinct form for each consonant-vowel combination (that is, they are syllabic), and among these, only d and m occur in three forms for all three vowels: 𐎭 d or da, 𐎭𐎠 dā, 𐎮𐎡 di or dī, 𐎯𐎢 du or dū. ( k, g do not occur before i, and j, v do not occur before u, so these consonants only have two forms each.) Sometimes medial long vowels are written with
1920-475: Is one of Afghanistan's two official languages, together with Pashto . The term Dari , meaning "of the court", originally referred to the variety of Persian used in the court of the Sasanian Empire in capital Ctesiphon , which was spread to the northeast of the empire and gradually replaced the former Iranian dialects of Parthia ( Parthian ). Tajik Persian ( форси́и тоҷикӣ́ , forsi-i tojikī ),
2016-585: Is one of the earliest attested Indo-European languages. According to certain historical assumptions about the early history and origin of ancient Persians in Southwestern Iran (where Achaemenids hailed from), Old Persian was originally spoken by a tribe called Parsuwash , who arrived in the Iranian Plateau early in the 1st millennium BCE and finally migrated down into the area of present-day Fārs province. Their language, Old Persian, became
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#17328020992882112-495: Is the appropriate designation of the language in English, as it has the longer tradition in western languages and better expresses the role of the language as a mark of cultural and national continuity. Iranian historian and linguist Ehsan Yarshater , founder of the Encyclopædia Iranica and Columbia University 's Center for Iranian Studies, mentions the same concern in an academic journal on Iranology , rejecting
2208-592: Is unique in that he did not have comparisons between Old Persian and known languages, as opposed to the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Rosetta Stone . All his decipherments were done by comparing the texts with known history. However groundbreaking, this inductive method failed to convince academics, and the official recognition of his work was denied for nearly a generation. Grotefend published his deductions in 1802, but they were dismissed by
2304-414: Is written from left to right. The script encodes three vowels, a , i , u , and twenty-two consonants, k , x , g , c , ç , j , t , θ , d , p , f , b , n , m , y , v , r , l , s , z , š , and h . Old Persian contains two sets of consonants: those whose shape depends on the following vowel and those whose shape is independent of the following vowel. The consonant symbols that depend on
2400-491: The Encyclopædia Iranica notes that the Iranian, Afghan, and Tajiki varieties comprise distinct branches of the Persian language, and within each branch a wide variety of local dialects exist. The following are some languages closely related to Persian, or in some cases are considered dialects: More distantly related branches of the Iranian language family include Kurdish and Balochi . The Glottolog database proposes
2496-506: The Kalila wa Dimna . The language spread geographically from the 11th century on and was the medium through which, among others, Central Asian Turks became familiar with Islam and urban culture. New Persian was widely used as a trans-regional lingua franca , a task aided due to its relatively simple morphology, and this situation persisted until at least the 19th century. In the late Middle Ages, new Islamic literary languages were created on
2592-668: 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 on the subcontinent and became the sole "official language" under the Mughal emperors . The Bengal Sultanate witnessed an influx of Persian scholars, lawyers, teachers, and clerics. Thousands of Persian books and manuscripts were published in Bengal. The period of
2688-601: The Sasanian emperors ), that a king's name is often followed by "great king, king of kings" and the name of the king's father. This understanding of the structure of monumental inscriptions in Old Persian was based on the work of Anquetil-Duperron , who had studied Old Persian through the Zoroastrian Avestas in India, and Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy , who had decrypted the monumental Pahlavi inscriptions of
2784-674: The Sultanate of Rum , Turkmen beyliks of Anatolia , Delhi Sultanate , the Shirvanshahs , Safavids , Afsharids , Zands , Qajars , Khanate of Bukhara , Khanate of Kokand , Emirate of Bukhara , Khanate of Khiva , Ottomans , and also many Mughal successors such as the Nizam of Hyderabad . Persian was the only non-European language known and used by Marco Polo at the Court of Kublai Khan and in his journeys through China. A branch of
2880-713: The Turkic , Armenian , Georgian , & Indo-Aryan languages . It also exerted some influence on Arabic, while borrowing a lot of vocabulary from it in the Middle Ages. Some of the world's most famous pieces of literature from the Middle Ages, such as the Shahnameh by Ferdowsi , the works of Rumi , the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám , the Panj Ganj of Nizami Ganjavi , The Divān of Hafez , The Conference of
2976-491: The ezāfe construction, expressed through ī (modern e/ye ), to indicate some of the relations between words that have been lost with the simplification of the earlier grammatical system. Although the "middle period" of the 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 BC. However, Middle Persian
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3072-597: The " Persianized " Turko-Mongol dynasties during the 12th to 15th centuries, and under restored Persian rule during the 16th to 19th centuries. Persian during this time served as lingua franca of Greater Persia and of much of the Indian subcontinent . It was also the official and cultural language of many Islamic dynasties, including the Samanids, Buyids , Tahirids , Ziyarids , the Mughal Empire , Timurids , Ghaznavids , Karakhanids , Seljuqs , Khwarazmians ,
3168-681: The Birds by Attar of Nishapur , and the miscellanea of Gulistan and Bustan by Saadi Shirazi , are written in Persian. Some of the prominent modern Persian poets were Nima Yooshij , Ahmad Shamlou , Simin Behbahani , Sohrab Sepehri , Rahi Mo'ayyeri , Mehdi Akhavan-Sales , and Forugh Farrokhzad . There are approximately 130 million Persian speakers worldwide, including Persians , Lurs , Tajiks , Hazaras , Iranian Azeris , Iranian Kurds , Balochs , Tats , Afghan Pashtuns , and Aimaqs . The term Persophone might also be used to refer to
3264-565: The Middle Ages, and is because of the lack of the phoneme /p/ in Standard Arabic. The standard Persian of Iran has been called, apart from Persian and Farsi , by names such as Iranian Persian and Western Persian , exclusively. Officially, the official language of Iran is designated simply as Persian ( فارسی , fārsi ). The standard Persian of Afghanistan has been officially named Dari ( دری , dari ) since 1958. Also referred to as Afghan Persian in English, it
3360-402: The Old Persian language itself. Grotefend only identified correctly the phonetic value of eight letters among the thirty signs he had collated. Grotefend made further guesses about the remaining words in the inscriptions, and endeavoured to rebuild probable sentences. Again relying on deductions only, and without knowing the actual script or language, Grotefend guessed a complete translation of
3456-543: The Ottoman Empire all spoke Persian, such as Sultan Selim I , despite being Safavid Iran's archrival and a staunch opposer of Shia Islam . It was a major literary language in the empire. Some of the noted earlier Persian works during the Ottoman rule are Idris Bidlisi 's Hasht Bihisht , which began in 1502 and covered the reign of the first eight Ottoman rulers, and the Salim-Namah , a glorification of Selim I. After
3552-530: The Persian language can be divided into the following three distinct periods: As a written language , Old Persian is attested in royal Achaemenid inscriptions. The oldest known text written in Old Persian is from the Behistun Inscription , dating to the time of King Darius I (reigned 522–486 BC). Examples of Old Persian have been found in what is now Iran , Romania ( Gherla ), Armenia , Bahrain , Iraq , Turkey, and Egypt . Old Persian
3648-425: The Persian language, a language historically called Dari, emerged in present-day Afghanistan. The first significant Persian poet was Rudaki . He flourished in the 10th century, when the Samanids were at the height of their power. His reputation as a court poet and as an accomplished musician and singer has survived, although little of his poetry has been preserved. Among his lost works are versified fables collected in
3744-401: The Persian model: Ottoman Turkish , Chagatai Turkic , Dobhashi Bengali , and Urdu, which are regarded as "structural daughter languages" of Persian. "Classical Persian" loosely refers to the standardized language of medieval Persia used in literature and poetry . This is the language of the 10th to 12th centuries, which continued to be used as literary language and lingua franca under
3840-886: The Perso-Arabic script. Persian was the first language to break through the monopoly of Arabic on writing in the Muslim world , with Persian poetry becoming a tradition in many eastern courts. It was used officially as a language of bureaucracy even by non-native speakers, such as the Ottomans in Anatolia , the Mughals in South Asia, and the Pashtuns in Afghanistan. It influenced languages spoken in neighboring regions and beyond, including other Iranian languages,
3936-484: The Sasanian Empire (224–651). However, it is not descended from the literary form of Middle Persian (known as pārsīk , commonly called Pahlavi), which was spoken by the people of Fars and used in Zoroastrian religious writings. Instead, it is descended from the dialect spoken by the court of the Sasanian capital Ctesiphon and the northeastern Iranian region of Khorasan , known as Dari. The region, which comprised
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4032-447: The Sasanian emperors. Grotefend focused on two inscriptions from Persepolis , called the " Niebuhr inscriptions ", which seemed to use the words "King" and "King of Kings" guessed by Münter, and which seemed to have broadly similar content except for what he thought must be the names of kings: Looking at similarities in character sequences, he made the hypothesis that the father of the ruler in one inscription would possibly appear as
4128-588: The Sassanids (who were Persians, i.e. from the southwest) from the preceding Arsacids (who were Parthians, i.e. from the northeast). While Ibn al-Muqaffa' (eighth century) still distinguished between Pahlavi (i.e. Parthian) and Persian (in Arabic text: al-Farisiyah) (i.e. Middle Persian), this distinction is not evident in Arab commentaries written after that date. "New Persian" (also referred to as Modern Persian)
4224-462: The Seljuks, the Sultanate of Rum , took Persian language, art, and letters to Anatolia. They adopted the Persian language as the official language of the empire. The Ottomans , who can roughly be seen as their eventual successors, inherited this tradition. Persian was the official court language of the empire, and for some time, the official language of the empire. The educated and noble class of
4320-576: The Xerxes inscription (Niebuhr inscription 2): "Xerxes the strong King, King of Kings, son of Darius the King, ruler of the world" ( "Xerxes Rex fortis, Rex regum, Darii Regis Filius, orbis rector" ). In effect, he achieved a fairly close translation, as the modern translation is: " Xerxes the Great King, King of Kings , son of Darius the King , an Achaemenian ". Grotefend's contribution to Old Persian
4416-617: The academic community. It was only in 1823 that Grotefend's discovery was confirmed, when the French archaeologist Champollion , who had just deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs , was able to read the Egyptian dedication of a quadrilingual hieroglyph-cuneiform inscription on an alabaster vase in the Cabinet des Médailles , the " Caylus vase ". The Egyptian inscription on the vase was in the name of King Xerxes I , and Champollion, together with
4512-498: The area of Lake Urmia in the records of Shalmaneser III . The exact identity of the Parsuwash is not known for certain, but from a linguistic viewpoint the word matches Old Persian pārsa itself coming directly from the older word * pārćwa . Also, as Old Persian contains many words from another extinct Iranian language, Median , according to P. O. Skjærvø it is probable that Old Persian had already been spoken before
4608-457: The code fas for the dialects spoken across Iran and Afghanistan. This consists of the individual languages Dari ( prs ) and Iranian Persian ( pes ). It uses tgk for Tajik, separately. In general, the Iranian languages are known from three periods: namely Old, Middle, and New (Modern). These correspond to three historical eras of Iranian history ; Old era being sometime around the Achaemenid Empire (i.e., 400–300 BC), Middle era being
4704-512: The collapse of the Sassanid state, Parsik came to be applied exclusively to (either Middle or New) Persian that was written in the Arabic script . From about the 9th century onward, 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
4800-906: The consonant symbol. Compared to the Avestan alphabet Old Persian notably lacks voiced fricatives, but includes the sign ç (of uncertain pronunciation) and a sign for the non-native l . Notably, in common with the Brahmic scripts , there appears to be no distinction between a consonant followed by an a and a consonant followed by nothing. Old Persian Cuneiform had a system for numerals as well as words, it uses mostly base ten. 1 𐏑 , 2 𐏒 , 5 𐏒𐏒𐏑 , 7 𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏑 , 8 𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏒 , 9 𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏑 ,10 𐏓 , 12 𐏓𐏒 , 13 𐏓𐏒𐏑 , 14 𐏓𐏒𐏒 , 15 𐏓𐏒𐏒𐏑 , 18 𐏓𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏒 , 19 𐏓𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏑 , 20 𐏔 , 22 𐏔𐏒 , 23 𐏔𐏒𐏑 , 25 𐏔𐏒𐏒𐏑 , 26 𐏔𐏒𐏒𐏒 , 27 𐏔𐏒𐏒𐏒𐏑 , 40 𐏔𐏔 , 60 𐏔𐏔𐏔 , 120 𐏕𐏔 Although based on
4896-479: The correct guess that this could be no other than Darius the Great , his father Hystapes , who was not a king, and his son the famous Xerxes . The inscriptions were made around this time; there were only two instances where a ruler came to power without being a previous king's son. They were Darius the Great and Cyrus the Great , both of whom became emperor by revolt. The deciding factors between these two choices were
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#17328020992884992-438: The engravers had to make cuts that imitated the forms easily made on clay tablets. The signs are composed of horizontal, vertical, and angled wedges. There are four basic components and new signs are created by adding wedges to these basic components. These four basic components are two parallel wedges without angle, three parallel wedges without angle, one wedge without angle and an angled wedge, and two angled wedges. The script
5088-600: The extent of its influence on certain languages of the Indian subcontinent. Words borrowed from Persian are still quite commonly used in certain Indo-Aryan languages, especially Hindi - Urdu (also historically known as Hindustani ), Punjabi , Kashmiri , and Sindhi . There is also a small population of Zoroastrian Iranis in India, who migrated in the 19th century to escape religious execution in Qajar Iran and speak
5184-585: The first name in the other inscription: the first word in Niebuhr 1 ( 𐎭𐎠𐎼𐎹𐎺𐎢𐏁 ) indeed corresponded to the 6th word in Niebuhr 2. Looking at the length of the character sequences, and comparing with the names and genealogy of the Achaemenid kings as known from the Greeks, also taking into account the fact that the father of one of the rulers in the inscriptions didn't have the attribute "king", he made
5280-482: The following phylogenetic classification: Old Persian cuneiform Old Persian cuneiform is a semi-alphabetic cuneiform script that was the primary script for Old Persian . Texts written in this cuneiform have been found in Iran ( Persepolis , Susa , Hamadan , Kharg Island ), Armenia , Romania ( Gherla ), Turkey ( Van Fortress ), and along the Suez Canal . They were mostly inscriptions from
5376-481: The following vowel act like the consonants in Devanagari . Vowel diacritics are added to these consonant symbols to change the inherent vowel or add length to the inherent vowel. However, the vowel symbols are usually still included so [di] would be written as [di] [i] even though [di] already implies the vowel. For the consonants whose shape does not depend on the following vowels, the vowel signs must be used after
5472-577: The formation of many modern languages in West Asia, Europe, Central Asia , and South Asia . Following the Turko-Persian Ghaznavid conquest of South Asia , Persian was firstly introduced in the region by Turkic Central Asians. The basis in general for the introduction of Persian language into the subcontinent was set, from its earliest days, by various Persianized Central Asian Turkic and Afghan dynasties. For five centuries prior to
5568-476: The formation of the Achaemenid Empire and was spoken during most of the first half of the first millennium BCE. Xenophon , a Greek general serving in some of the Persian expeditions, describes many aspects of Armenian village life and hospitality in around 401 BCE, which is when Old Persian was still spoken and extensively used. He relates that the Armenian people spoke a language that to his ear sounded like
5664-410: The language of the Persians. Related to Old Persian, but from a different branch of the Iranian language family, was Avestan , the language of the Zoroastrian liturgical texts. The complex grammatical 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 developed
5760-462: The last Shah of Iran ( Persia ), assumed the title for the first time since the Muslim conquest of Persia in the 7th century. As an empress during Sassanid times, the principal Shahbanu was also titled banbishnan banbishn ("Queen of Queens") analogous to the emperor's title shahanshah (lit. "King of Kings") to distinguish her from the other queens in the royal household. Farah Pahlavi sometimes continues to be referred to as Shahbanu , as
5856-527: The latter two, are generally agreed to have been later inscriptions. Around the time period in which Old Persian was used, nearby languages included Elamite and Akkadian . One of the chief differences between the writing systems of these languages is that Old Persian is a semi- alphabet , but Elamite and Akkadian are syllabaries . Further, Old Persian was written in a consistent semi-alphabetic system, but Elamite and Akkadian used borrowings from other languages, creating mixed systems. Old Persian cuneiform
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#17328020992885952-447: The letters 𐎭𐎠𐎼𐎹𐎺𐎢𐏁 with the name d-a-r-h-e-u-sh for Darius , as known from the Greeks. This identification was correct, although the actual Persian spelling was da-a-ra-ya-va-u-sha , but this was unknown at the time. Grotefend similarly equated the sequence 𐎧𐏁𐎹𐎠𐎼𐏁𐎠 with kh-sh-h-e-r-sh-e for Xerxes , which again was right, but the actual Old Persian transcription was kha-sha-ya-a-ra-sha-a . Finally, he matched
6048-432: The middle-period form only continuing in the texts of Zoroastrianism . Middle Persian is considered to be a later form of the same dialect as Old Persian. The native name of Middle Persian was Parsig or Parsik , 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
6144-411: The most widely spoken. The term Persian is an English derivation of Latin Persiānus , the adjectival form of Persia , itself deriving from Greek Persís ( Περσίς ), a Hellenized form of Old Persian Pārsa ( 𐎱𐎠𐎼𐎿 ), which means " Persia " (a region in southwestern Iran, corresponding to modern-day Fars ). According to the Oxford English Dictionary , the term Persian as
6240-469: The multi-lingual Behistun Inscription , and ultimately Sumerian through Akkadian-Sumerian bilingual tablets. Most scholars consider the writing system to be an independent invention because it has no obvious connections with other writing systems at the time, such as Elamite , Akkadian, Hurrian , and Hittite cuneiforms. While Old Persian's basic strokes are similar to those found in cuneiform scripts, Old Persian texts were engraved on hard materials, so
6336-474: The names of their fathers and sons. Darius's father was Hystaspes and his son was Xerxes, while Cyrus's father was Cambyses I and his son was Cambyses II . Within the text, the father and son of the king had different groups of symbols for names so Grotefend assumed that the king must have been Darius. These connections allowed Grotefend to figure out the cuneiform characters that are part of Darius, Darius's father Hystaspes, and Darius's son Xerxes. He equated
6432-411: The nationalist movement of the time. The academy was a key institution in the struggle to re-build Iran as a nation-state after the collapse of the Qajar dynasty. During the 1930s and 1940s, the academy led massive campaigns to replace the many Arabic , Russian , French , and Greek loanwords whose widespread use in Persian during the centuries preceding the foundation of the Pahlavi dynasty had created
6528-448: The necessity of protecting the Persian language against foreign words, and to the standardization of Persian orthography , were under the reign of Naser ed Din Shah of the Qajar dynasty in 1871. After Naser ed Din Shah, Mozaffar ed Din Shah ordered the establishment of the first Persian association in 1903. This association officially declared that it used Persian and Arabic as acceptable sources for coining words. The ultimate goal
6624-595: The newly discovered ruins of Persepolis was made by the Spain and Portugal ambassador to Persia, Antonio de Gouveia in a 1611 publication. Various travelers then made attempts at illustrating these new inscriptions, which in 1700 Thomas Hyde first called "cuneiform", but were deemed to be no more than decorative friezes. Proper attempts at deciphering Old Persian cuneiform started with faithful copies of cuneiform inscriptions, which first became available in 1711 when duplicates of Darius's inscriptions were published by Jean Chardin . Around 1764, Carsten Niebuhr visited
6720-414: The next period most officially around the Sasanian Empire , and New era being the period afterward down to present day. According to available documents, the Persian language is "the only Iranian language" for which close philological relationships between all of its three stages are established and so that Old, Middle, and New Persian represent one and the same language of Persian; that is, New Persian
6816-549: The northern part of Greece). Vardar Yenicesi differed from other localities in the Balkans insofar as that it was a town where Persian was also widely spoken. However, the Persian of Vardar Yenicesi and throughout the rest of the Ottoman-held Balkans was different from formal Persian both in accent and vocabulary. The difference was apparent to such a degree that the Ottomans referred to it as "Rumelian Persian" ( Rumili Farsisi ). As learned people such as students, scholars and literati often frequented Vardar Yenicesi, it soon became
6912-483: The official language of the Achaemenid kings. Assyrian records, which in fact appear to provide the earliest evidence for ancient Iranian (Persian and Median) presence on the Iranian Plateau, give a good chronology but only an approximate geographical indication of what seem to be ancient Persians. In these records of the 9th century BCE, Parsuwash (along with Matai , presumably Medians) are first mentioned in
7008-466: The orientalist Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin , was able to confirm that the corresponding words in the cuneiform script were indeed the words which Grotefend had identified as meaning "king" and "Xerxes" through guesswork. The findings were published by Saint-Martin in Extrait d'un mémoire relatif aux antiques inscriptions de Persépolis lu à l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres , thereby vindicating
7104-427: The pioneering work of Grotefend. More advances were made on Grotefend's work and by 1847, most of the symbols were correctly identified. A basis had now been laid for the interpretation of the Persian inscriptions. However, lacking knowledge of old Persian, Grotefend misconstrued several important characters. Significant work remained to be done to complete the decipherment. Building on Grotefend's insights, this task
7200-638: The present territories of northwestern Afghanistan as well as parts of Central Asia, played a leading role in the rise of New Persian. Khorasan, which was the homeland of the Parthians, was Persianized under the Sasanians. Dari Persian thus supplanted Parthian language , which by the end of the Sasanian era had fallen out of use. New Persian has incorporated many foreign words, including from eastern northern and northern Iranian languages such as Sogdian and especially Parthian. The transition to New Persian
7296-588: The region during the following centuries. Persian continued to act as a courtly language for various empires in Punjab through the early 19th century serving finally as the official state language of the Sikh Empire , preceding British conquest and the decline of Persian in South Asia. Beginning in 1843, though, English and Hindustani gradually replaced Persian in importance on the subcontinent. Evidence of Persian's historical influence there can be seen in
7392-602: The reign of Sultan Ghiyathuddin Azam Shah is described as the "golden age of Persian literature in Bengal". Its stature was illustrated by the Sultan's own correspondence and collaboration with the Persian poet Hafez ; a poem which can be found in the Divan of Hafez today. A Bengali dialect emerged among the common Bengali Muslim folk, based on a Persian model and known as Dobhashi ; meaning mixed language . Dobhashi Bengali
7488-410: The ruins of Persepolis , and was able to make excellent copies of the inscriptions, identifying "three different alphabets". His faithful copies of the cuneiform inscriptions at Persepolis proved to be a key turning-point in the decipherment of cuneiform, and the birth of Assyriology . The set of characters that would later be known as Old Persian cuneiform was soon perceived as being the simplest of
7584-494: The same form before a and i , and a distinct form only before u : 𐎴 n or na, 𐎴𐎠 nā, 𐎴𐎡 ni or nī, 𐎵𐎢 nu or nū. The effect is not unlike the English [dʒ] sound, which is typically written g before i or e , but j before other vowels ( gem , jam ), or the Castilian Spanish [θ] sound, which is written c before i or e and z before other vowels ( cinco, zapato ): it
7680-423: The sequence of the father who was not a king 𐎻𐎡𐏁𐎫𐎠𐎿𐎱 with Hystaspes , but again with the supposed Persian reading of g-o-sh-t-a-s-p , rather than the actual Old Persian vi-i-sha-ta-a-sa-pa . By this method, Grotefend had correctly identified each king in the inscriptions, but his identification of the phonetic value of individual letters was still quite defective, for want of a better understanding of
7776-613: The site of a flourishing Persianate linguistic and literary culture. The 16th-century Ottoman Aşık Çelebi (died 1572), who hailed from Prizren in modern-day Kosovo , was galvanized by the abundant Persian-speaking and Persian-writing communities of Vardar Yenicesi, and he referred to the city as a "hotbed of Persian". Many Ottoman Persianists who established a career in the Ottoman capital of Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul ) pursued early Persian training in Saraybosna, amongst them Ahmed Sudi . The Persian language influenced
7872-409: The small number of different signs forming inscriptions. He proved that they belonged to the Achaemenid Empire , which led to the suggestion that the inscriptions were in the Old Persian language and probably mentioned Achaemenid kings. He identified a highly recurring group of characters in these inscriptions: 𐎧𐏁𐎠𐎹𐎰𐎡𐎹 . Because of its high recurrence and length, he guessed that this must be
7968-573: The standard Persian of Tajikistan, has been officially designated as Tajik ( тоҷикӣ , tojikī ) since the time of the Soviet Union . It is the name given to the varieties of Persian spoken in Central Asia in general. The international language-encoding standard ISO 639-1 uses the code fa for the Persian language, as its coding system is mostly based on the native-language designations. The more detailed standard ISO 639-3 uses
8064-717: The standard Persian. The Hazaragi dialect (in Central Afghanistan and Pakistan), Herati (in Western Afghanistan), Darwazi (in Afghanistan and Tajikistan), Basseri (in Southern Iran), and the Tehrani accent (in Iran, the basis of standard Iranian Persian) are examples of these dialects. Persian-speaking peoples of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan can understand one another with a relatively high degree of mutual intelligibility . Nevertheless,
8160-542: The time period of Darius I , such as the DNa inscription , as well as his son, Xerxes I . Later kings down to Artaxerxes III used more recent forms of the language classified as "pre-Middle Persian". Old Persian cuneiform is loosely inspired by the Sumero - Akkadian cuneiform ; however, only one glyph is directly derived from it – l(a) ( 𐎾 ), from la ( 𒆷 ). ( lᵃ did not occur in native Old Persian words, but
8256-485: The use of Farsi in foreign languages. Etymologically, the Persian term Farsi derives from its earlier form Pārsi ( Pārsik in Middle Persian ), which in turn comes from the same root as the English term Persian . In the same process, the Middle Persian toponym Pārs ("Persia") evolved into the modern name Fars. The phonemic shift from /p/ to /f/ is due to the influence of Arabic in
8352-467: The various types of cuneiform scripts that have been encountered, and because of this was understood as a prime candidate for decipherment. Niebuhr determined that there were only 42 characters in this category of inscriptions, which he named "Class I", and affirmed that this must therefore be an alphabetic script. In 1802, Friedrich Münter confirmed that "Class I" characters (today called "Old Persian cuneiform") were probably alphabetical, also because of
8448-459: The word for "king" ( xa-ša-a-ya-θa-i-ya , now known to be pronounced in Old Persian xšāyaθiya ). He guessed correctly, but that would only be confirmed several decades later. Münter also understood that each word was separated from the next by a backslash sign ( 𐏐 ). Grotefend extended this work by realizing, based on the known inscriptions of much later rulers (the Pahlavi inscriptions of
8544-597: Was already complete by the era of the three princely dynasties of Iranian origin, the Tahirid dynasty (820–872), Saffarid dynasty (860–903), and Samanid Empire (874–999). Abbas of Merv is mentioned as being the earliest minstrel to chant verse in the New Persian tongue and after him the poems of Hanzala Badghisi were among the most famous between the Persian-speakers of the time. The first poems of
8640-651: Was found in Akkadian borrowings.) Scholars today mostly agree that the Old Persian script was invented by about 525 BC to provide monument inscriptions for the Achaemenid king Darius I , to be used at Behistun . While a few Old Persian texts may seem to have been inscribed during the reigns of Cyrus the Great (CMa, CMb, and CMc, all found at Pasargadae ), the first Achaemenid emperor, or of Arsames and Ariaramnes (AsH and AmH, both found at Hamadan ), grandfather and great-grandfather of Darius I, all five, specially
8736-573: Was never used where not needed, so the system remained (logo-)syllabic. For a while it was speculated that the alphabet could have had its origin in such a system, with a leveling of consonant signs a millennium earlier producing something like the Ugaritic alphabet , but today it is generally accepted that the Semitic alphabet arose from Egyptian hieroglyphs , where vowel notation was not important. (See Proto-Sinaitic script .) Old Persian cuneiform
8832-454: Was only deciphered by a series of guesses, in the absence of bilingual documents connecting it to a known language. Various characteristics of sign series, such as length or recurrence of signs, allowed researchers to hypothesize about their meaning, and to discriminate between the various possible historically known kings, and then to create a correspondence between each cuneiform and a specific sound. The first mention of ancient inscriptions in
8928-597: Was patronised and given official status under the Sultans of Bengal , and was a popular literary form used by Bengalis during the pre-colonial period, irrespective of their religion. Following the defeat of the Hindu Shahi dynasty, classical Persian was established as a courtly language in the region during the late 10th century under Ghaznavid rule over the northwestern frontier of the subcontinent . Employed by Punjabis in literature, Persian achieved prominence in
9024-502: Was performed by Eugène Burnouf , Christian Lassen and Sir Henry Rawlinson . The decipherment of the Old Persian cuneiform script was at the beginning of the decipherment of all the other cuneiform scripts, as various multi-lingual inscriptions between the various cuneiform scripts were obtained from archaeological discoveries. The decipherment of Old Persian was the starting point for the decipherment of Elamite , Babylonian and Akkadian (predecessor of Babylonian), especially through
9120-613: Was taught in state schools, and was also offered as an elective course or recommended for study in some madrasas . Persian learning was also widespread in the Ottoman-held Balkans ( Rumelia ), with a range of cities being famed for their long-standing traditions in the study of Persian and its classics, amongst them Saraybosna (modern Sarajevo , Bosnia and Herzegovina), Mostar (also in Bosnia and Herzegovina), and Vardar Yenicesi (or Yenice-i Vardar, now Giannitsa , in
9216-492: Was to prevent books from being printed with wrong use of words. According to the executive guarantee of this association, the government was responsible for wrongfully printed books. Words coined by this association, such as rāh-āhan ( راهآهن ) for "railway", were printed in Soltani Newspaper ; but the association was eventually closed due to inattention. A scientific association was founded in 1911, resulting in
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