Perso-Arabic Script

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', respectively), in addition to the obsolete that was used for the sound . This letter is no longer used in Persian, as the -sound changed to , e.g. archaic > 'language'.

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: .

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 , 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. There are eight Persian letters that are mainly used in Arabic or foreign loanwords and not in native words: , , , , , , , and . These eight letters are also common used in proper names only. Unlike Arabic, the Persian language absolutely does not have pharyngealization at all. Although the letter is mainly used in Arabic loanwords, there are some native Persian words with this letter: , , 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.

*

Overview table

Historically, in Early New Persian, there was a special letter for the sound . This letter is no longer used, as the -sound changed to , e.g. archaic /zaβān/ > 'language'.

Another obsolete variant of the twenty-sixth letter is which used to appear in old manuscripts.

Another obsolete variant of the twenty-fifth letter is which used to appear in old manuscripts.

The archaic letter was also used as a substitute for the twenty-sixth letter of the Persian alphabet, , which was used to appear in the older manuscripts of Persian in the late 18th century to the early 19th century.

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: ( in Arabic), ( in Arabic), and or ( in Arabic, pronounced in Western Persian), and (gemination). Other Arabic diacritics may be seen in Arabic loanwords in Persian.

Short vowels

Of the four Arabic diacritics, the Persian language has adopted the following three for short vowels. The last one, sukūn, which indicates the lack of a vowel, has not been adopted.

There is no standard transliteration for Persian. The letters 'i' and 'u' are only ever used as short vowels when transliterating Dari or Tajik Persian. See Persian Phonology

Diacritics differ by dialect, due to Dari having 8 distinct vowels compared to the 6 vowels of Farsi. See Persian Phonology

In Farsi, 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 which carries the short vowel, e.g. (, meaning "hope"). In a word that ends with a vowel, letters , and respectively become the proxy letters for , and , e.g. (, meaning "new") or (, meaning "package").

Tanvin (nunation)

Nunation (, ) 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 graphical form since it is never tied to a preceding or following letter. However, it is sometimes 'seated' on a , or , and in that case, the seat behaves like an ordinary , or 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.

Unicode has accepted in the Miscellaneous Symbols range. In Unicode 1.0 this symbol was known as .
It is a stylization of () used as the emblem of Iran. It is also a part of the flag of Iran.

The Unicode Standard has a compatibility character defined that can represent , the Persian name of the currency of Iran.

Novel letters

The Persian alphabet has four extra letters that are not in the Arabic alphabet: , (''ch'' in ''chair''), (''s'' in ''measure''), . An additional fifth letter was used for (''v in'' Spanish ) but it is no longer used.

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:

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 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.

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

Arabic alphabets
Persian orthography
Alphabets
Persian scripts