Persian Writing System

Description of Language

Phonology - Grammar - Writing System

Writing System

Old Persian is one of the oldest languages in the world; it was based on the cuneiform writing system (pictogram style) as early as the 6th century B.C. Each religious group in Persia at the time had their own alphabet. Later, the Persians invented a new alphabet called Pahlavi to replace the cuneiform alphabet. However, after the Arabic conquest in 651, the Persians adopted a unified Arabic script for writing. For more details on the Arabic conquest of Persia, see: http://www.iranchamber.com/

The modern Persian writing system (also known as Perso-Arabic) uses the Arabic alphabet, but with the addition of four letters which do not occur in Arabic. As such, there are 32 characters in the Persian alphabet. The Persian Alphabet does not use capital letters and words are written in cursive (connected). The alphabet is read from right to left while numbers are read from left to right and resemble Arabic numbers. There are 29 phonemes. Compared to English, there is a very close correspondence between the 32 characters and the phonemes; there are also fewer rules governing the use of these phonemes than in English.

Not all of the sounds in the Arabic alphabet exist in the Persian language; as a result, more that one character may represent more than one sound. For example, using the alphabet chart below you will see that there are four letters in Persian for the sound [z]. However, unlike in English, where a written representation may also translate into more than one sound, (as the vowel sounds in bear and clear) in Persian each letter may only represent a single phoneme or sound. In these cases, a dot or diacritic is used to distinguish one letter from another. Also, a single sound in Farsi may have many symbols that correspond to it, which may also add to the confusion.

Persian Alphabet (with IPA symbols)

(Borrowed from: http://www.iranchamber.com/literature/persian_language.php)

Different letter forms

Not all letters connect to letters that follow them; these letters are called non-connectors and there are 7 of them in the Persian language. These connect only to connecting letters that precede them. Most letters have a different form depending on their position in a word. See below for examples.

Vowels:

Of the 32 characters in Persian, all are consonants except for 3 which can also be vowels. There are also four short vowels which are written as signs placed over or under a letter to create a specific sound. These short vowels are often omitted in writing. As such, it may be difficult to determine the proper word usage unless context cues are used.

Short Vowel signs

	Placed above a letter to create the short vowel sound "a" as in "dad"
	Placed under a letter to create the short vowel sound "e" as in "leg"
	Placed above a letter to create the short vowel sound "o" as in "log"
	Indicate a pause in the sound as in "sand"

Unipers Alphabet:

In order to facilitate in the reading and writing of the Persian language, scholars have been trying to introduce a new Latin based alphabet to replace Persian know as UniPers.

Unipers Conversion Table

The goals of using this new Unipers alphabet are to give the Persian language with a clear Latin-based script and to make reading and writing of the Persian language more accessible to users.