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Persian
is one of the Indo-Iranian languages, a sub-group of the Indo-European
languages. There are two sub-branches of Indo-Iranian languages:
Iranic and Indic (or Indo-Aryan). Modern Persian falls under the
Iranic sub-branch of Indo-Iranian languages.
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(Chart borrowed from http://crl.nmsu.edu/shiraz/ling/introduction.html) |
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The language of Persian originated in Southern Iran (which used to be called Persis) and was spoken by the Parsa, a nomadic people who came to Persis in 1000 BC. For more infomation on the three phases in the development of Persian use these links: Old, Middle, and Modern. Old Persian is recorded in the southwest in cuneiform inscriptions (550-330 B.C.). Old Persian and Avestan are closely related to Sanskrit, and are highly inflected languages. Modern Persian is known as a South-Western Iranian language. The Persian spoken today has strong Arabic and Parthian influences. For more details, see http://www.farsinet.com/farsi. |
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The Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European languages is one of the oldest languages for which we have historical records. Vedic hymns date back to 1000 BC, and Classical Sanskrit appears around 500 BC. The Indo-Europeans who settled in the Iranian Plateau developed the sacred language Avestan. Avestan is the sister branch of Old Persian. The Avestan speakers are the ancestors of modern Persian speakers. Indo-European languages can be classified as satem and centum languages. Satem is the Avestan (an ancient Iranian language) word for "hundred"; centum is the Latin word for "hundred". This classification is based on the development of the Indo-European palatal k. For more information on the classification of Indo-European languages, see Pyles and Algeo, "The Origins and Development of the English Language", page 66. The Indo-European palatal k (as in *kmtóm "hundred") is a distinct phoneme from velar k (as in the verbal root *kwer- "do, make"). The asterisk (*) indicates a transcription of Indo-European. Example: karma is a Sanskrit loanword that has the velar k. Satem languages include Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic, Armenian, and Albanian. Thus, the satem branch also includes Farsi, Pashto, Dari, Kurdish, Baluchi, and a number of other languages and dialects. In satem languages, the two sounds for k remain separate phonemes, and the palatal k becomes a sibilant. Example: Sanskrit satam, Lithuanian šimtas, Old Church Slavic suto. In contrast, in other Indo-European languages, the two sounds for k become a single phoneme. Example: In the Germanic group, palatal k shifts to h, as in Greek (he)katon, and Old English hund. Old Persian phonetics are represented by three pairs of monophthongs (long and short a, i, u), diphthongs (ai, au), and 23 consonant phonemes. The morphology shows seven or eight cases, three numbers, three genders, verbs had very complicated structure. The vocabulary of Old Persian borrowed plenty of words from other ancient Iranian languages, and also from non-Indo-European tongues such as Aramaic (Semitic). Middle Persian was the language of the Sassanian Empire (AD 224-641). Middle Persian grammar is more simplified in comparison to Old Persian. It was usually written in an ambiguous script with multivalent letters, adopted from Aramaic. After the Arab conquest in the 7th century, use of Middle Persian declined. A lot of Middle Persian literature was translated into Arabic, but the bulk of it was lost during Islamic times. Middle Persian phonetics changed greatly. For example, Indo-European g'h (which became z in Old Persian) now turned into d; s > h, kw > sp > s. Parthian and other neighbour languages such as Arabic influenced these changes. The morphology now becomes completely analytic, loses genders and cases, many verbal forms. Modern Persian was developed by the 9th century. It is a continuation of an area-wide standard language that had considerable Parthian and Middle Persian elements, with additional influences from other Iranian languages. It is written in a Perso-Arabic script (an expanded version of Arabic script). Modern Persian grammar is simpler in comparison to Middle Persian. It has absorbed a vast Arabic vocabulary. There are no gender and noun cases; nouns only have categories of definiteness and number. The definite article -í is used post-positively (after the noun). All Modern Persian verbs are conjugated following the same type, and can be simple or complex. For more information on Old, Middle, and Modern Persian, see http://indoeuro.bizland.com/tree/iran/persian.html. Iranic sub-branch speakers have distinguished their speech from the Indic sub-branch by raising and fronting the larynx and tongue precluding voiced aspiration. Example: *bh > b, *dh > d, *jh > j, *gh > g. Indo-European transcriptions are indicated with an asterisk (*). Also, they further accentuated lingual fronting by "prognathizing" (jutting out the jaw) while keeping the tip of the tongue against the lower teeth. This caused dentalization of the earlier palatal affricates. Example: Indo-European palatal stops * ky > *c > [Proto-Iranian] *ç; * gy > *j > [Proto-Iranian] * z. In addition, they restrained the occlusion of s until only the accompanying glottal turbulence remained, unless the s preceded a stop consonant. Example: *s > h. Later, they restrained the occlusion of stops before other consonantal sounds, changing dental affricates and voiceless aspirated stops to spirants (*ç [ts] > s [Old Persian þ], *z [dz] > z [but Old Persian d], *ph > f, *th > þ, *kh > x) and producing spirants before consonants (*pt > ft, *pr > fr, etc.). South-Western Iranian Languages The South-Western Iranian languages center on the southern Zagros Mountains and Fars in south-western Iran. Persian, the most influential of them, spread from there in ancient times under the Achaemenian and Sassanian empires, through Iran and northern Afghanistan as far as Central Asia and Tajikistan. South-Western Iranian speakers distinguished themselves through a progressive strengthening of consonantal occlusion, increasing acoustic noise through voiceless spirancy or voiced plosion, with occlusive strengthening probably caused by increased prognathizing. Example: Old Persian *ç [ts] > þ [a voiceless dental spirant], *z [dz] > d, *dv > d. Modern Persian dialects of Afghanistan preserve the eight-vowel system of early Modern Persian, which is reduced to six vowels in Iran and Tajikistan. Dialects of Iran show an accentual tendency toward lingual fronting, while in Tajikistan lingual backing with lip rounding is an accentual feature; thus a in Afghan Persian becomes [æ] in Iran, while â ([å]) in Iran and Afghanistan becomes o in Tajiki. Within Persian, polarization appears as fronted lingual accent in Iran versus backed lingual accent in Tajikistan. For more information on the genetic classification of Persian, and its difference from other Iranic sub-branch languages, see http://users.sedona.net/~strand/Iranian/Iranians.html. |
