Persian alphabet

The Persian alphabet (), also known as the Perso-Arabic script, is the right-to-left alphabet used for the Persian language. An Arabic-based alphabet, it is largely identical to the Arabic alphabet 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'. Although the sound () is written as "" nowadays in New Persian), it is different to the Arabic () sound, which uses the same letter.

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 among 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

thumb|Example showing the [[Nastaʿlīq calligraphic style's proportion rules]]

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 nine Persian letters that are mainly used in Arabic or foreign loanwords and not in native words: , , , , , , , and . These nine letters are also commonly used only in proper names. Unlike Arabic, the Persian language 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 in Persian, while it is pronounced as in Arabic.

{| class="wikitable"

!Letter

!Persian

!Arabic

|/s/

|/θ/

|/h/

|/ħ/

|/z/

|/ð/

|/s/

|/sˤ/

|/z/

|/dˤ/

|/t/

|/tˤ/

|/z/

|/ðˤ/

|/ʔ/

|/ʕ/

| or

|/ɣ/

Overview table

{| class="wikitable sortable"

|- style="text-align:center;"

!rowspan="2"| #

! rowspan="2" | Name<br/>(in Persian)

! rowspan="2" | Name<br/>(transliterated)

!rowspan="2"| Transliteration

!rowspan="2"| IPA

!rowspan="2"| Unicode

!colspan="4"|Contextual forms

! Final

! Medial

! Initial

! Isolated

|- style="text-align:center;"

| rowspan="4" |0

| rowspan="4" |

| rowspan="4" |Glottal stop

| U+0621

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| U+0623

| colspan="2" style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;" |

|- style="text-align:center;"

| U+0626

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| U+0624

| colspan="2" style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;" |

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 1

| U+0627

| colspan="2" style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;" |

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 2

| U+0628

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 3

| U+067E

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 4

| U+062A

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 5

| /

| U+062B

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 6

| /

| U+062C

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 7

| U+0686

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 8

| ()

| /

| U+062D

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 9

| U+062E

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 10

| U+062F

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;" colspan=2|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 11

| /

| U+0630

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;" colspan=2|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 12

| U+0631

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;" colspan=2|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 13

| U+0632

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;" colspan=2|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 14

| U+0698

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;" colspan=2|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 15

| U+0633

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 16

| U+0634

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 17

| /

| U+0635

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 18

| /

| U+0636

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 19

| /

| U+0637

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 20

| /

| U+0638

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 21

| , /

| U+0639

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 22

| ,

| U+063A

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 23

| U+0641

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 24

| U+0642

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 25

| U+06A9

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 26

| U+06AF

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 27

| U+0644

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 28

| U+0645

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 29

| U+0646

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| rowspan="2" | 30

| rowspan="2" |

| (in Farsi)

| / / /

| , , , (only word-finally)

| rowspan="2" | U+0648

| colspan="2" rowspan="2" style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;" |

|- style="text-align:center;"

| (in Dari)

| / / /

| , , ,

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 31

| ()

| , or and (word-finally)

| U+0647

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

|- style="text-align:center;"

| 32

| / / / (Also / in Dari)

| , , ( / in Dari)

| U+06CC

|style="line-height:180%;padding:10px;font-size:200%;"|

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'.

{| class="wikitable" style="line-height:1.6;text-align:center"

! Name<br/>(in Persian)

! Name<br/>(transliterated)

!Transliteration

! Sound

! Isolated form

! Final form

! Medial form

! Initial form

|ڤ

| ve

| / /

| style="font-size: 2em;" |

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

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"

! Sound

! Shape

! Name

! Unicode code point

|style="font-size: larger"|

| U+067E

| (ch)

|style="font-size: larger"|

| U+0686

| (zh)

|style="font-size: larger"|

| U+0698

|style="font-size: larger"|

| U+06AF

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:

{| class="wikitable mw-collapsible" style="text-align: center;"

! Hindu-Arabic !! Persian

!Name!! Unicode !! Arabic !! Unicode

| 0 || <big>۰</big>

|صفر

sefr

| U+06F0 || <big>٠</big> || U+0660

| 1 || <big>۱</big>

|يک

yek

| U+06F1 || <big>١</big> || U+0661

| 2 || <big>۲</big>

|دو

| U+06F2 || <big>٢</big> || U+0662

| 3 || <big>۳</big>

|سه

| U+06F3 || <big>٣</big> || U+0663

| 4 || <big>۴</big>

|چهار

čahâr

| U+06F4 || <big>٤</big> || U+0664

| 5 || <big>۵</big>

|پنج

panj

| U+06F5 || <big>٥</big> || U+0665

| 6 || <big>۶</big>

|شش

šeš

| U+06F6 || <big>٦</big> || U+0666

| 7 || <big>۷</big>

|هفت

haft

| U+06F7 || <big>٧</big> || U+0667

| 8 || <big>۸</big>

|هشت

hašt

| U+06F8 || <big>٨</big> || U+0668

| 9 || <big>۹</big>

|نه

| U+06F9 || <big>٩</big> || U+0669

| rowspan="2" | - || <big>ی</big>

|ye|| U+06CC

| <big>ي</big> || U+064A

| <big>ک</big>

|kâf|| U+06A9 || <big>ك</big> || U+0643

Comparison of different numerals

{|class="wikitable nounderlines" style="text-align:center;line-height:normal"

|- style="font-size:120%"

| style="font-size:85%"|Western Arabic

|0 ||1 || 2 || 3 || 4

|5 || 6 || 7 || 8 || 9

| 10

|- style="font-size:160%"

| style="font-size:63%"|Eastern Arabic

| || || || ||

|- style="font-size:160%"

| style="font-size:63%"| Persian

| || || || ||

|- style="font-size:160%"

| style="font-size:63%"| Urdu

| || || || ||

|- style="font-size:160%"

| style="font-size:63%"| Abjad 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.

References

External links

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

Letters

Overview table

Novel letters

Deviations from the Arabic script

Comparison of different numerals

Word boundaries

Cyrillic Persian alphabet in Tajikistan

See also

References

External links