43 Facts About Persian language

1.

Persian is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken and used officially within Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan in three mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Iranian Persian, Dari Persian (officially known as Dari since 1964) and Tajiki Persian (officially known as Tajik since 1999).

FactSnippet No. 521,836
2.

Old Persian language is attested in Old Persian language cuneiform on inscriptions from between the 6th and 4th century BC.

FactSnippet No. 521,837
3.

Middle Persian language is attested in Aramaic-derived scripts on inscriptions and in Zoroastrian and Manichaean scriptures from between the third to the tenth centuries (see Middle Persian language literature).

FactSnippet No. 521,838
4.

New Persian language literature was first recorded in the ninth century, after the Muslim conquest of Persia, since then adopting the Arabic script.

FactSnippet No. 521,839
5.

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.

FactSnippet No. 521,840
6.

Some of the prominent modern Persian language poets were Nima Yooshij, Ahmad Shamlou, Simin Behbahani, Sohrab Sepehri, Rahi Mo'ayyeri, Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, and Forugh Farrokhzad.

FactSnippet No. 521,841
7.

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 the most widely spoken.

FactSnippet No. 521,842
8.

Term Persian language is an English derivation of Latin, the adjectival form of, itself deriving from Greek, a Hellenized form of Old Persian language, which means "Persia" (a region in southwestern Iran, corresponding to modern-day Fars).

FactSnippet No. 521,843
9.

Farsi, which is the Persian word for the Persian language, has been used widely in English in recent decades, more often to refer to Iran's standard Persian.

FactSnippet No. 521,844
10.

Etymologically, the Persian language term derives from its earlier form, which in turn comes from the same root as the English term Persian language.

FactSnippet No. 521,845
11.

The term Dari, meaning "of the court", originally referred to the variety of Persian language 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.

FactSnippet No. 521,846
12.

Examples of Old Persian language have been found in what is Iran, Romania, Armenia, Bahrain, Iraq, Turkey and Egypt.

FactSnippet No. 521,847
13.

Old Persian is one of the oldest Indo-European languages which is attested in original texts.

FactSnippet No. 521,848
14.

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 the formation of the Achaemenid Empire and was spoken during most of the first half of the first millennium BCE.

FactSnippet No. 521,849
15.

Xenophon, a Greek general serving in some of the Persian language expeditions, describes many aspects of Armenian village life and hospitality in around 401 BCE, which is when Old Persian language was still spoken and extensively used.

FactSnippet No. 521,850
16.

Persian language relates that the Armenian people spoke a language that to his ear sounded like the language of the Persians.

FactSnippet No. 521,851
17.

Complex grammatical conjugation and declension of Old Persian language yielded to the structure of Middle Persian language in which the dual number disappeared, leaving only singular and plural, as did gender.

FactSnippet No. 521,852
18.

Middle Persian language developed the ezafe construction, expressed through i, to indicate some of the relations between words that have been lost with the simplification of the earlier grammatical system.

FactSnippet No. 521,853
19.

However, Middle Persian is not actually attested until 600 years later when it appears in the Sassanid era inscriptions, so any form of the language before this date cannot be described with any degree of certainty.

FactSnippet No. 521,854
20.

Middle Persian language is considered to be a later form of the same dialect as Old Persian language.

FactSnippet No. 521,855
21.

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.

FactSnippet No. 521,856
22.

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.

FactSnippet No. 521,857
23.

New Persian language texts written in the Arabic script first appear in the 9th-century.

FactSnippet No. 521,858
24.

The language is a direct descendant of Middle Persian, the official, religious and literary language of the Sasanian Empire.

FactSnippet No. 521,859
25.

However, it is not descended from the literary form of Middle Persian language, which was spoken by the people of Fars and used in Zoroastrian religious writings.

FactSnippet No. 521,860
26.

Dari Persian thus supplanted Parthian language, which by the end of the Sasanian era had fallen out of use.

FactSnippet No. 521,861
27.

New Persian has incorporated many foreign words, including from eastern northern and northern Iranian languages such as Sogdian and especially Parthian.

FactSnippet No. 521,862
28.

Persian language flourished in the 10th century, when the Samanids were at the height of their power.

FactSnippet No. 521,863
29.

New Persian language 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.

FactSnippet No. 521,864
30.

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.

FactSnippet No. 521,865
31.

Persian language influenced the formation of many modern languages in West Asia, Europe, Central Asia, and South Asia.

FactSnippet No. 521,866
32.

For five centuries prior to the British colonization, Persian was widely used as a second language in the Indian subcontinent.

FactSnippet No. 521,867
33.

Words borrowed from Persian are still quite commonly used in certain Indo-Aryan languages, especially Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, Kashmiri and Sindhi.

FactSnippet No. 521,868
34.

Persian language-speaking peoples of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan can understand one another with a relatively high degree of mutual intelligibility.

FactSnippet No. 521,869
35.

Iranian Persian language has six vowels and twenty-three consonants; both Dari and Tajiki have eight vowels.

FactSnippet No. 521,870
36.

Early New Persian language had a series of five long vowels along with three short vowels, and.

FactSnippet No. 521,871
37.

That offers a synthetic analysis including both quality and quantity, which often suggests that Modern Persian vowels are in a transition state between the quantitative system of Classical Persian and a hypothetical future Iranian language, which will eliminate all traces of quantity and retain quality as the only active feature.

FactSnippet No. 521,872
38.

Persian language makes extensive use of word building and combining affixes, stems, nouns and adjectives.

FactSnippet No. 521,873
39.

Persian language frequently uses derivational agglutination to form new words from nouns, adjectives, and verbal stems.

FactSnippet No. 521,874
40.

Inclusion of Mongolic and Turkic elements in the Persian language should be mentioned, not only because of the political role a succession of Turkic dynasties played in Iranian history, but because of the immense prestige Persian language and literature enjoyed in the wider Islamic world, which was often ruled by sultans and emirs with a Turkic background.

FactSnippet No. 521,875
41.

Persian language has had a significant lexical influence, via Turkish, on Albanian and Serbo-Croatian, particularly as spoken in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

FactSnippet No. 521,876
42.

Tajiki, which is considered by some linguists to be a Persian dialect influenced by Russian and the Turkic languages of Central Asia, is written with the Cyrillic script in Tajikistan.

FactSnippet No. 521,877
43.

Persian language'storically, there was a special letter for the sound.

FactSnippet No. 521,878