Persian
This article deals with Persian as it relates to NationStates. For more general information, see the Wikipedia article on this subject.
| Spoken in: Parthia, Wadj, Scythirus, The Federated Stars |
| Total Speakers: ~18.5 Billion |
| Genetic Classification: Indo-European Indo-Iranian |
| Official Language of: Parthia, Wadj, Scythirus, Afghanistan |
| Regulated by: Persepolis Institute of the Persian Language |
Persian (Persian : فارسي ), (Arabic : فارسي), (Parthian: Pârsi) is the official language in most of the nations listed here. There are Persian minorities in the USA, EU, Russia and the Arab League. Persian is a language that has been spoken for thousands of years, and is the holy language of the Ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism.
Persian is the main language of Wadj, a nation occupying part of real-life Iran and Egypt. It is also the official national language of Parthia.
The Dari dialect of Persian is one of the two official national languages of Afghanistan alongside Pashto, and one of the several regional languages of the country, alongside Uzbek, Turkmen, Nuristani, and Baluchi. The standard register of Dari in Afghanistan is Afghanistani Standard Dari (ASD), which is regulated by the Kunduz Dari Academy.
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Classification and Background
Persian is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Iranian language family's Western Branch, and is the single largest Iranian language in the world today, with the largest number of speakers. In general, the language can be broken down into several dialects, all of which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. The two largest are standard Persian, which is spoken in the preponderance of Persian speaking nations, and Parthian, which holds many similarities in grammar to standard Persian, but has a slightly different vocabulary. Tajik and Dari, which are spoken in Tajikstan and Afghanistan respectively, are the two other major dialects, sharing similar grammar but different vocabularies and pronunciation standards. Standard Persian and Dari are usually written in a modified version of the Arabic script, Parthian uses a modified Latin script in most discourse, while Tajik is usually written in Cyrillic.
Persian or Farsi
Generally speaking, most Persian Language Institutes suggest English speakers refer to Persian as Persian when speaking English. Fârsi, which is common as a reference to the language in English, is the word standard Persian speakers use to describe their own language and thus, using it to refer to Persian is somewhat inaccurate and akin to calling German "Deutsch" while speaking English. The Persepolis Institute of the Persian Language, which controls the use of Persian in Parthia, also agrees with this position, emphasising that using the word Farsi to refer to the Parthian dialect is even more inaccurate since Parthian speakers of Persian refer to their own language, and Persian in general, as Pârsi rather than Fârsi.
Generally speaking, when discussing the relation between the various dialects of Persian, it is acceptable to use Fârsi, Pârsi, and Dâri to refer to the standard, Parthian, and Afghan varieties of the Persian language respectively. The Persepolis Institute, however, also deems it acceptable to refer to the Parthian dialect of Persian as Pârsi while speaking English when referring only to the Parthian dialect rather than the Persian language as a whole.
Grammar
Persian grammar is considered relatively simple, having lost most elements of gramatical complexity since Middle Persian, including most case and all grammatical gender. Persian is classified as a Subject-Object-Verb language, like most Slavic languages or Armenian, but, using accusative markers and prepositions, it is possible to have an exceptionally free word order.
Nouns in Persian do not have grammatical gender, nor are they usually conjugated for cases, which have been lost in Persian, with exception to the accusative. The accusative case is marked in Persian nouns with the use of the case marker râ (in Farsi: را) which follows an accusative noun phrase. Pluralization is also highly regular. Animate nouns tend to be pluralized with the suffix -ân, or on some occasions, -hâ, while all inanimate nouns are pluralized with -hâ.
Pronouns are also generally regular, but, like most languages lacking grammatical gender, have no seperate word for he or she, making some English constructions difficult to replicate in Persian.
| Person | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | man من | mâ ما |
| 2nd | to تو | shomâ شما |
| 3rd | u او (non-human/human), vey وى (human only and formal) |
ânhâ آنها (non-human/human), ishân ایشان (human only and formal) |
Posessive pronouns also follow a very regular pattern, using suffixes attached to nouns to imply possession of an object.
| Person | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | -am | -emanا |
| 2nd | -et | -etan ا |
| 3rd | -esh | -eshan |
Adjectives usually follow the noun they modify, as is the case with Romance languages, however, in derivational words created through the combination of a noun and adjective, adjectives precede the noun. This kind of construction can be seen by the word for lucky in Persian: khosh-bakht, literally means good-luck.
Conjugation of verbs is also very regular, using a small number of conjugations with the verbal root to conjugate properly. Again, the only case which must be accounted for is the accusative, which has specialized conjugations associated with it.
| Person | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | am | im |
| 2nd | i | id |
| 3rd | ad | and |
| Person | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | am | emân |
| 2nd | at | etân |
| 3rd | ash | eshân |
Thus, the conjugation for Khordaen, which is the Persian word meaning, to eat, is done as thus:
| Person | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | Khoram | Khorim |
| 2nd | Khori | Khorid |
| 3rd | Khorad | Khorand |
Parthian Persian
The Parthian dialect of Persian, or Pârsi, reflects the historical pecularities of the Parthian state as being one of the few parts of the Persian speaking world which did not adopt Islam and often, tried to prevent Islamic influence from enroaching on Parthian culture. As such, the rich Arabic vocabulary Persian adopted after the Islamic expansions into the Middle East is almost entirely absent from the Parthian dialect, as is the practice of writing in the Arabic script. Rather than use Arabic script, Parthia historically made use of two scripts, Pazend, which originated as a means of writing Zoroastrian scripture and Pahlavi, which originated from a form of modified Aramaic during the period from roughly 240 AD, when the Pazend script came into use. By 1500, Pahlavi fell out of use in Parthia, to be replaced by Pazend, which in turn, stayed as the official script of Parthian Persian until the 1950s, when Shah Ardeshir XI introduced a Latin script to improve literacy, which was made difficult by Pazend's hard-to-read nature. Pazend is still somewhat well known in upper-echelon social circles of Parthia, but tends to be relegated to the same role of cursive in English, only far more exclusive.
The Parthian Alphabet consists of many of the same characters as English, with a few modified characters and Digraphs which are considered a seperate letter and have few equivalents in European languages. The script is considered mostly phonetic, with sounds corresponding precisely to letters. Long vowels found in some European languages do not exist in Pârsi. Parthian usually renders European loan words with long vowels using a bar over the vowel such as "ā" to indicate a long vowel sound such as the "a" in pay.
| A a | Â â | B b | CH ch | D d | E e | F f | G g | H h | I i | |
| /æ/ | /ɑː/ | /b/ | /ʧ/ | /d/ | /e/ | /f/ | /ɡ/ | /h/ | /i/ | |
| J j | K k | L l | M m | N n | O o | P p | GH gh | R r | S s | |
| /dʒ/ | /k/ | /l/ | /m/ | /n/ | /o/ | /p/ | /ɣ/ | /ɾ/ | /s/ | |
| SH sh | T t | U u | V v | W w | KH kh | Y y | Z z | ZH zh | ' | |
| /ʃ/ | /t/ | /u/ | /v/ | /w/ | /χ/ | /j/ | /z/ | /ʒ/ | /ʔ/ |
As a general rule, the pronunciation of letters in Parthian follows the rules of European languages. The difference, however, between A and  in Persian is somewhat important, since they do not have real equivalents in English. A is pronounced as a sort of blend between ae such as in some Latin words, while  indicates the presence of a light aspirative blended with a typical short a sound, usually being rendered in English as ah, such as the word Shah.
Kh and Gh have few equivalents in European languages and none in English. Kh is typically pronounced with the same sound as the ch in the German word Buch. Gh is closest to, but not entirely like the pronunciation of R in the French word Merci.
In addition, there are some words in Standard Persian which do not appear in Parthian. While the Persian equivalent words are used somewhat uncommonly in Persian, they are usually the proper way of speaking the Parthian dialect.
| English | Persian | Parthian |
|---|---|---|
| Prince (Aristocratic title)¹ | Mirza | Shâdust |
| Distinguished | Afzal | Barjasteh |
| Late | Dir | Derhang |
| Soul/Spirit | Ruh | Pâzd |
| New | Jadid | Nou/Novin |
| Thank you | Mam'noon | Sepâsgozâr |
¹ Prince in this sense is used as a purely aristocratic and honorific title, like the Russian title Dvor. The royal title of Prince in Persian and Parsi is Shâzadeh, which refers to a decendent of a monarch.
