A page from a 12th century manuscript of "Kitab al-Abniya 'an Haqa'iq al-Adwiya" byAbu Mansur Muwaffaq with special Persian letters p (پ), ch (چ) and g (گ = ڭـ).
ThePersian alphabet (Persian:الفبای فارسی,romanized: Alefbâ-ye Fârsi), also known as thePerso-Arabic script, is theright-to-leftalphabet used for thePersian language. This is like theArabic script with four additional letters:پ چ ژ گ (the sounds 'g', 'zh', 'ch', and 'p', respectively), in addition to the obsoleteڤ that was used for the sound/β/. This letter is no longer used in Persian, as the[β]-sound changed to[b], e.g. archaicزڤان/zaβɑn/ >زبان/zæbɒn/ 'language'.[2][3] Although the sound/β/ (ڤ) is written as "و" nowadays inFarsi (Dari-Parsi/New Persian), it is different to the Arabic/w/ (و) sound, which uses the same letter.
The script is mostly but not exclusivelyright-to-left; mathematical expressions, numeric dates and numbers bearing units are embedded from left to right. The script iscursive, meaning most letters in a word connect to each other; when they are typed, contemporaryword processors automatically join adjacent letter forms. Persian is unusual among Arabic scripts because a zero-width non-joiner is sometimes entered in a word, causing a letter to become disconnected from others in the same word.
The Persian alphabet is directly derived and developed from theArabic alphabet. The Arabic alphabet was introduced to the Persian-speaking world after theMuslim conquest of Persia and the fall of theSasanian Empire in the 7th century. Following this, theArabic language became the principal language of government and religious institutions inPersia, which led to the widespread usage of the Arabic script. ClassicalPersian literature and poetry were affected by this simultaneous usage ofArabic andPersian. A new influx ofArabic vocabulary soon entered thePersian language.[4] In the 8th century, theTahirid dynasty andSamanid dynasty officially adopted the Arabic script for writing Persian, followed by theSaffarid dynasty in the 9th century, gradually displacing the variousPahlavi scripts used for the Persian language earlier. By the 9th-century, the Perso-Arabic alphabet became the dominant form of writing inGreater Khorasan.[4][5][6]
During theSoviet 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:Tajik alphabet § History.
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.[7] These include 28 letters of theArabic 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 ishe, which is used for bothح andه. For clarification, they are often calledhâ-ye jimi (literally "jim-likehe" afterjim, the name for the letterج that uses the same base form) andhâ-ye do-češm (literally "two-eyedhe", after the contextual middle letterformـهـ), respectively. There are eight Persian letters that are mainly used in Arabic or foreign loanwords and not in native words:ث,ح,ذ,ص,ض,ط,ظ,ع andغ. These eight letters are also common used in proper names only. Unlike Arabic, the Persian language does not havepharyngealization at all. Although the letterغ is mainly used in Arabic loanwords, there are some native Persian words with this letter:آغاز,زغال, etc. The pronunciation of these letters in Persian can differ from their pronunciation in Arabic. For example, the letter ث is pronounced as/s/ in Persian, while it is pronounced as/θ/ in Arabic.
Historically, inEarly New Persian, there was a special letter for the sound/β/. This letter is no longer used, as the/β/-sound changed to/b/, e.g. archaicزڤان /zaβān/ >زبان/zæbɒːn/ 'language'.[9]
The archaic letterݿ/ɡ/ was also used as a substitute for the twenty-sixth letter of the Persian alphabet,گ, which was used to appear in the older manuscripts of Persian in the late 18th century to the early 19th century.
The alphabet in 16 fonts: Noto Nastaliq Urdu, Scheherazade, Lateef, Noto Naskh Arabic, Markazi Text, Noto Sans Arabic, Baloo Bhaijaan, El Messiri SemiBold, Lemonada Medium, Changa Medium, Mada, Noto Kufi Arabic, Reem Kufi, Lalezar, Jomhuria, and Rakkas.
Seven letters (و,ژ,ز,ر,ذ,د,ا) do not connect to the following letter, unlike the rest of the letters of the alphabet. The seven letters have the same form in isolated and initial position and a second form in medial and final position. For example, when the letterاalef is at the beginning of a word such asاینجاinjâ ("here"), the same form is used as in an isolatedalef. In the case ofامروزemruz ("today"), the letterرre takes the final form and the letterوvâv takes the isolated form, but they are in the middle of the word, andز also has its isolated form, but it occurs at the end of the word.
Persian script has adopted a subset ofArabic diacritics:zabar/æ/ (fatḥah in Arabic),zēr/e/ (kasrah in Arabic), andpēš/ou̯/ or/o/ (ḍammah in Arabic, pronouncedzamme inWestern Persian),tanwīne nasb/æn/ andšaddah (gemination). Other Arabic diacritics may be seen in Arabic loanwords in Persian.
Of the four Arabic diacritics, the Persian language has adopted the following three for short vowels. The last one,sukūn, which indicates the lack of a vowel, has not been adopted.
^a. There is no standard transliteration for Persian. The letters 'i' and 'u' are only ever used as short vowels when transliterating Dari or Tajik Persian. SeePersian Phonology
^b. Diacritics differ by dialect, due to Dari having 8 distinct vowels compared to the 6 vowels of Farsi. SeePersian Phonology
In Farsi, none of these short vowels may be the initial or final grapheme in an isolated word, although they may appear in the final position as aninflection, when the word is part of a noun group. In a word that starts with a vowel, the first grapheme is a silentalef which carries the short vowel, e.g.اُمید (omid, meaning "hope"). In a word that ends with a vowel, lettersع,ه andو respectively become the proxy letters forzebar,zir andpiš, e.g.نو (now, meaning "new") orبسته (bast-e, meaning "package").
Nunation (Persian:تنوین,tanvin) is the addition of one of three vowel diacritics to a noun or adjective to indicate that the word ends in an alveolar nasal sound without the addition of the letter nun.
The following are not actual letters but different orthographical shapes for letters, a ligature in the case of thelâm alef. As toﺀ (hamza), it has only one graphical form since it is never tied to a preceding or following letter. However, it is sometimes 'seated' on avâv,ye oralef, and in that case, the seat behaves like an ordinaryvâv,ye oralef respectively. Technically,hamza is not a letter but a diacritic.
This is the medial character which connects other characters
Although at first glance, they may seem similar, there are many differences in the way the different languages use the alphabets. For example, similar words are written differently in Persian and Arabic, as they are used differently.
Unicode has acceptedU+262B☫FARSI SYMBOL in theMiscellaneous Symbols range.[10] In Unicode 1.0 this symbol was known asSYMBOL OF IRAN.[11] It is a stylization ofالله (Allah) used as theemblem of Iran. It is also a part of theflag of Iran.
The Unicode Standard has a compatibility character definedU+FDFC﷼RIAL SIGN that can representریال, the Persian name of thecurrency of Iran.[12]
The Persian alphabet has four extra letters that are not in the Arabic alphabet:/p/,/t͡ʃ/ (ch inchair),/ʒ/ (s inmeasure),/ɡ/. An additional fifth letterڤ was used for/β/ (v inSpanishhuevo) but it is no longer used.
Persian uses theEastern Arabic numerals, but the shapes of the digits 'four' (۴), 'five' (۵), and 'six' (۶) are different from the shapes used in Arabic. All the digits also have different codepoints inUnicode:[13]
^The alphabet Mazanderani uses is identical to that of Persian's, having no additional modified letters
^Many Perso-Arabic scripts in South Asia share close similarities (use of Nastaliq, use of superscript ط to represent retroflex consonants, etc.) due to mutual contact during development. It is inaccurate to say that one Indo-Persian script directly descends from another, and instead, they are best seen as a cluster of scripts with common origin.
^However, the Arabic variant continues to be used in its traditional style in theNile Valley, similarly as it is used in Persian and Ottoman Turkish.
^Same Unicode characters as the Persian, but language is set to Urdu. The numerals 4, 6 and 7 are different from Persian. On some devices, this row may appear identical to Persian.
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 thezero-width non-joiner.
As part of therussification ofCentral Asia, the Cyrillic script was introduced in the late 1930s.[14][15][16][17] The alphabet has remained Cyrillic since then. In 1989, with the growth inTajik nationalism, a law was enacted declaring Tajik thestate language. In addition, the law officially equated Tajik withPersian, placing the wordFarsi (the endonym for the Persian language) after Tajik. The law also called for a gradual reintroduction of the Perso-Arabic alphabet.[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][excessive citations]
The Persian alphabet was introduced intoeducation and public life, although the banning of theIslamic Renaissance Party in 1993 slowed adoption. In 1999, the wordFarsi was removed from the state-language law, reverting the name to simplyTajik.[1] As of 2004[update] thede facto standard in use is theTajik Cyrillic alphabet,[2] and as of 1996[update] only a very small part of the population can read the Persian alphabet.[3]
^"3.8 Block-by-block Charts" § Miscellaneous Dingbats p. 325 (155 electronically).The Unicode Standard Version 1.0. Unicode.org
^For the proposal, seePournader, Roozbeh (2001-09-20)."Proposal to add Arabic Currency Sign Rial to the UCS"(PDF). It proposes the character under the name ofARABIC CURRENCY SIGN RIAL, which was changed by the standard committees toRIAL SIGN.