Romanization of Persian
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Romanization or Latinization of Persian (, ) is the representation of the
Persian language Persian ( ), also known by its endonym and exonym, endonym Farsi (, Fārsī ), is a Western Iranian languages, Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian languages, Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, Indo-Iranian subdivision ...
(
Iranian Persian Iranian Persian (), Western Persian or Western Farsi, natively simply known as Persian (), refers to the Variety (linguistics), varieties of the New Persian, Persian language spoken in Iran and by others in neighboring countries, as well as by ...
,
Dari Dari (; endonym: ), Dari Persian (, , or , ), or Eastern Persian is the variety of the Persian language spoken in Afghanistan. Dari is the Afghan government's official term for the Persian language;Lazard, G.Darī – The New Persian ...
and Tajik) with the
Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...
. Several different romanization schemes exist, each with its own set of rules driven by its own set of ideological goals. Romanization is familiar to many Persian speakers. Many use an ''ad hoc'' romanization for text messaging and email; road signs in Iran commonly include both Persian and English (in order to make them accessible to foreigners); and websites use romanized domain names.


Romanization paradigms

Because the
Persian script Persian may refer to: * People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language ** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples ** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...
is an
abjad An abjad ( or abgad) is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving the vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels. The term was introd ...
writing system (with a
consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...
-heavy inventory of letters), many distinct words in standard Persian can have identical spellings, with widely varying pronunciations that differ in their (unwritten)
vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...
sounds. Thus a romanization paradigm can follow either transliteration (which mirrors spelling and
orthography An orthography is a set of convention (norm), conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, Word#Word boundaries, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and Emphasis (typography), emphasis. Most national ...
) or transcription (which mirrors pronunciation and
phonology Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...
).


Transliteration

Transliteration Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus '' trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → and → the digraph , Cyrillic → , Armenian → or L ...
(in the strict sense) attempts to be a complete representation of the original writing, so that an informed reader should be able to reconstruct the original spelling of unknown transliterated words. Transliterations of Persian are used to represent individual Persian words or short quotations, in scholarly texts in English or other languages that do not use an Abjad alphabet. A transliteration will still have separate representations for different consonants of the
Persian alphabet The Persian alphabet (), also known as the Perso-Arabic script, is the right-to-left alphabet used for the Persian language. It is a variation of the Arabic script with four additional letters: (the sounds 'g', 'zh', 'ch', and 'p', respecti ...
that are pronounced identically in Persian. Transliterations commonly used in the English-speaking world include BGN/PCGN romanization and
ALA-LC Romanization ALA-LC (American Library AssociationLibrary of Congress) is a set of standards for romanization, the representation of text in other writing systems using the Latin script. Applications The system is used to represent bibliographic information by ...
. Non-academic English-language quotation of Persian words usually uses a simplification of one of the strict transliteration schemes (typically omitting
diacritical mark A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...
s) and/or unsystematic choices of spellings meant to guide English speakers using English spelling rules towards an approximation of the Persian sounds.


Transcription

Transcriptions of Persian attempt to straightforwardly represent Persian phonology in the
Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...
, without requiring a close or reversible correspondence with the Persian script, and also without requiring a close correspondence to English phonetic values of Roman letters.


Main romanization schemes

* DMG (1969), a strict scientific system by the German Oriental Society ( Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft). It corresponds to Deutsches Institut für Normung standard DIN 31635. * ALA-LC (1997), the
ALA-LC romanization ALA-LC (American Library AssociationLibrary of Congress) is a set of standards for romanization, the representation of text in other writing systems using the Latin script. Applications The system is used to represent bibliographic information by ...
. * BGN/PCGN (1958), the BGN/PCGN romanization. * EI (1960), the system used in early editions of ''
Encyclopædia Iranica ''Encyclopædia Iranica'' is a project whose goal is to create a comprehensive and authoritative English-language encyclopedia about the history, culture, and civilization of Iranian peoples from prehistory to modern times. Scope The ''Encyc ...
''. * EI (2012), its contemporary modification. * UN (1967), the Iranian national system (1966), that was approved by the UNGEGN in 1967. * UN (2012), its contemporary modification.


Comparison table

Notes:


Antiquity

In antiquity, Old and Middle Persian employed various scripts including Old Persian cuneiform, Pahlavi and Avestan scripts. For each period there are established transcriptions and transliterations by prominent linguists. Notes: A sample romanization (a poem by the Persian poet Hâfez):


Other romanization schemes


Baháʼí Persian romanization

Baháʼís use a system standardized by Shoghi Effendi, which he initiated in a general letter on March 12, 1923. The Baháʼí transliteration scheme was based on a standard adopted by the Tenth International Congress of Orientalists which took place in
Geneva Geneva ( , ; ) ; ; . is the List of cities in Switzerland, second-most populous city in Switzerland and the most populous in French-speaking Romandy. Situated in the southwest of the country, where the Rhône exits Lake Geneva, it is the ca ...
in September 1894. Shoghi Effendi changed some details of the Congress's system, most notably in the use of digraphs in certain cases (e.g. ''s͟h'' instead of ''š''). A detailed introduction to the Baháʼí Persian romanization can usually be found at the back of a Baháʼí scripture.


ASCII Internet romanizations

It is common to write Persian language with only the
Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...
(as opposed to the
Persian alphabet The Persian alphabet (), also known as the Perso-Arabic script, is the right-to-left alphabet used for the Persian language. It is a variation of the Arabic script with four additional letters: (the sounds 'g', 'zh', 'ch', and 'p', respecti ...
) especially in
online chat Online chat is any direct text-, audio- or video-based (webcams), one-on-one or one-to-many ( group) chat (formally also known as synchronous conferencing), using tools such as instant messengers, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), talkers and possi ...
,
social networks A social network is a social structure consisting of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), networks of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of meth ...
,
email Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...
s and SMS. It has developed and spread due to a former lack of software supporting the Persian alphabet, and/or due to a lack of knowledge about the software that was available. Although Persian writing is supported in recent
operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...
s, there are still many cases where the Persian alphabet is unavailable and there is a need for an alternative way to write Persian with the basic Latin alphabet. This way of writing is sometimes called Fingilish or Pingilish (a
portmanteau In linguistics, a blend—also known as a blend word, lexical blend, or portmanteau—is a word formed by combining the meanings, and parts of the sounds, of two or more words together.
of ''Fârsi'' or ''Persian'' and ''English''). In most cases this is an ''ad hoc'' simplification of the scientific systems listed above (such as ALA-LC or BGN/PCGN), but ignoring any special letters or diacritical signs. The details of the spelling also depend on the contact language of the speaker; for example, the vowel is often spelt "oo" after English, but Persian speakers from Germany and some other European countries are more likely to use "u".


Persian alphabet based on Latin in USSR

In the USSR from 1931 to 1938, the Persian alphabet based on Latin was used. It was used for teaching in schools, the '' Bejraqe Sorx'' (Red Banner) newspaper was published in Ashgabat, as well as textbooks and other literature.


Tajik Latin alphabet

The
Tajik language Tajik, Tajik Persian, Tajiki Persian, also called Tajiki, is the variety of Persian spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan by ethnic Tajiks. It is closely related to neighbouring Dari of Afghanistan with which it forms a continuum of mutually inte ...
or Tajik Persian is a variety of the Persian language. It was written in the
Tajik SSR The Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, also commonly known as Soviet Tajikistan, the Tajik SSR, TaSSR, or simply Tajikistan, was one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union which existed from 1929 to 1991 in Central Asia. The Tajik Re ...
in a standardized Latin script from 1926 until the late 1930s, when the script was officially changed to Cyrillic. As a result of these factors romanization schemes of the Tajik Cyrillic script follow rather different principles. Even though it is largely unused,
Google Translate Google Translate is a multilingualism, multilingual neural machine translation, neural machine translation service developed by Google to translation, translate text, documents and websites from one language into another. It offers a web applic ...
implements the alphabet as the Latin transliteration for Tajik.


Variation proposed by Mir Shamsuddin Adib-Soltani

A variation (that is sometimes called "Pârstin") proposed by linguist Mir Shamsuddin Adib-Soltani in 1976 has seen some use by other linguists, such as David Neil MacKenzie for the transliteration of the Persian scripture. The letters of this variation of the Latin alphabet are the basic Latin letters: ''Aa'', ''Bb'', ''Cc'', ''Dd'', ''Ee'', ''Ff'', ''Gg'', ''Hh'', ''Ii'', ''Jj'', ''Kk'', ''Ll'', ''Mm'', ''Nn'', ''Oo'', ''Pp'', ''Qq'', ''Rr'', ''Ss'', ''Tt'', ''Uu'', ''Vv'', ''Xx'', ''Yy'', ''Zz'', plus the additional letters to support the native sounds: ''Ââ'', ''Čč'', ''Šš'', ''Žž'' (the latter three from Slavic alphabets, like the Czech one). Besides being one of the simplest variations proposed for the Latinization of the Persian alphabet, this variation is based on the Alphabetic principle. Based on this principle, each individual speech sound is represented by a single letter and there is a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and the letters that represent them. This principle, besides increasing the clarity of the text and preventing confusion for the reader, is specifically useful for representing the native sounds of the Persian language, for which there are no equivalents in most other languages written in a Latin-based alphabet. For instance, compound letters used in the other variations, such as ''kh'' and ''gh'', in addition to ''sh'' and ''zh'' are respectively represented by ''x'', ''q'', ''š'' and ''ž''.


See also

*
Persian alphabet The Persian alphabet (), also known as the Perso-Arabic script, is the right-to-left alphabet used for the Persian language. It is a variation of the Arabic script with four additional letters: (the sounds 'g', 'zh', 'ch', and 'p', respecti ...
* Persian phonology * Romanization of Syriac * List of English words of Persian origin *, a 1944 treatise by Ahmad Kasravi, proposing reforms to Persian including writing it in the Latin script.


References


Toponymic Guidelines for map and other editors – Revised edition 1998. Working Paper No. 41
'. Submitted by the Islamic Republic of Iran. UNGEGN, 20th session. New York, 17–28 January 2000.

New Persian Romanization System. E/CONF.101/118/Rev.1*
'. Tenth United Nations Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names. New York, 31 July – 9 August 2012.


External links


Comparison of DMG, UN, ALA-LC, BGN/PCGN, EI, ISO 233-3 transliterations

Transliteration of Non-Roman Scripts

Iranian Committee on the Standardization of Geographical Names (ICSGN)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Romanization Of Persian Persian orthography Romanization of Arabic Persian scripts