Persian Alphabets

The Persian alphabet ( fa, الفبای فارسی, Alefbâye Fârsi) is a writing system that is a version of the Arabic script used for the Persian language spoken in Iran (Western Persian) and Afghanistan ( Dari Persian) since the 7th century after the Muslim conquest of Persia.

The Persian dialect spoken in Tajikistan ( Tajiki Persian) is written in the Tajik alphabet, a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet which has been in use since the Soviet era.

The Persian alphabet is directly derived and developed from the Arabic alphabet. After the Muslim conquest of Persia and the fall of the Sasanian Empire in the 7th century, Arabic became the language of government and especially religion in Persia for two centuries. The replacement of the Pahlavi scripts with the Persian alphabet to write the Persian language was done by the Saffarid dynasty and Samanid dynasty in 9th-century Greater Khorasan.

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. Extended versions of the Persian alphabet are used to write a wide variety of Indo-Iranian languages, including Kurdish, Balochi, Pashto, Urdu, Punjabi, Saraiki, Sindhi and Kashmiri. Turkic languages spoken within Iran, such as Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Qashqai, Chaharmahali, and Khalaj use the Persian alphabet as well.

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.

The names of the letters are mostly the ones used in Arabic except for the Persian pronunciation. The only ambiguous name is , which is used for both and . For clarification, they are often called (literally "-like " after , the name for the letter that uses the same base form) and (literally "two-eyed ", after the contextual middle letterform ), respectively.

Overview table

Historically, there was also a special letter for the sound . This letter is no longer used, as the /β/-sound changed to /b/, e.g. archaic /zaβān/ > /zæbɒn/ 'language'

Variants

Letter construction

The i'jam diacritic characters are illustrative only; in most typesetting the combined characters in the middle of the table are used.

Persian Yē has 2 dots below in the initial and middle positions only. The standard Arabic version always has 2 dots below.

Letters that do not link to a following letter

Seven letters (, , , , , , ) do not connect to the following letter, unlike the rest of the letters of the alphabet. The seven letters have the same form in isolated and initial position and a second form in medial and final position. For example, when the letter is at the beginning of a word such as ("here"), the same form is used as in an isolated . In the case of ("today"), the letter takes the final form and the letter takes the isolated form, but they are in the middle of the word, and also has its isolated form, but it occurs at the end of the word.

Diacritics

Persian script has adopted a subset of Arabic diacritics: zebar ( in Arabic), zir ( in Arabic), and piš ''or'' ( in Arabic, pronounced ''zamme'' in Western Persian), tanwīne nasb and šaddah ( gemination). Other Arabic diacritics may be seen in Arabic loanwords in Persian.

Short vowels

Of the four Arabic short vowels, the Persian language has adopted the following three. The last one, sukūn, has not been adopted.

In Iranian Persian, none of these short vowels may be the initial or final grapheme in an isolated word, although they may appear in the final position as an inflection, when the word is part of a noun group. In a word that starts with a vowel, the first grapheme is a silent ''alef'' which carries the short vowel, e.g. (''omid'', meaning "hope"). In a word that ends with a vowel, letters , and respectively become the proxy letters for ''zebar'', ''zir'' and ''piš'', e.g. نو (''now'', meaning "new") or بسته (''bast-e'', meaning "package").

Tanvin (nunation)

Nunation ( fa, تنوین, ) is the addition of one of three vowel diacritics to a noun or adjective to indicate that the word ends in an alveolar nasal sound without the addition of the letter nun.

Tašdid

Other characters

The following are not actual letters but different orthographical shapes for letters, a ligature in the case of the . As to (''hamza''), it has only one graphic since it is never tied to a preceding or following letter. However, it is sometimes 'seated' on a vâv, ye or alef, and in that case, the seat behaves like an ordinary vâv, ye or alef respectively. Technically, ''hamza'' is not a letter but a diacritic.

Although at first glance, they may seem similar, there are many differences in the way the different languages use the alphabets. For example, similar words are written differently in Persian and Arabic, as they are used differently.

Novel letters

The Persian alphabet has four extra letters that are not in the Arabic alphabet: , (''ch'' in ''chair''), (''s'' in ''measure''), .

Deviations from the Arabic script

Persian uses the Eastern Arabic numerals, but the shapes of the digits 'four' (), 'five' (), and 'six' () are different from the shapes used in Arabic. All the digits also have different codepoints in Unicode:

* 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

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 remained Cyrillic until the end of the 1980s with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. 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.

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''. the ''de facto'' standard in use is the Tajik Cyrillic alphabet, and only a very small part of the population can read the Persian alphabet.

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

External links

Dastoore khat
- The Official document in Persian by Academy of Persian Language and Literature

{{DEFAULTSORT:Perso-Arabic Script
Persian alphabets
Arabic alphabets
Persian orthography
Alphabets
Persian scripts
Officially used writing systems of India