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Persian (فارسی), also known as Farsi (local name), Parsi, Tajiki or Dari, is a language spoken in Iran, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. It has official-language status in the first three countries. There are over 75 million native speakers [1]. It belongs to the Indo-European language family. It is of the Subject Object Verb type.1 History
Persian is a member of the Indo-European family of languages, and within that family, it belongs to the Indo-Iranian ( Aryan) branch. Scholars believe the Iranian sub-branch consists of the following chronological linguistic path: Old Persian ( Avestan and Achaemenids Persian) ==> Middle Persian ( Pahlavi, Parthian, and Sassanids Persian) ==> Modern Persian ( Dari, c. 900Alternate uses, see Number 900. Events Gyeonhwon formally establishes the kingdom of Hubaekje in southwestern Korea. Births Deaths August 13 Zwentibold, last King of Lotharingia Donald II, King of the Scots and Picts; succeeded by Constantine II. to present.
( Old Persian, the main language of the Achaemenid inscriptions, should not be confused with the non-Indo-European Elamite languageElamite is an extinct language, which was spoken in the ancient Elamite Empire. Elamite was an agglutinative language, and was not related to the neighboring Semitic languages, or Indo-European languages, and although some call Elamite the "sister" to the (see Behistun inscription). Over this period, the morphologyMorphology is the following: In linguistics, morphology is the study of the structure of word forms. In biology, morphology is the study of the form or shape of an organism or part thereof. It can also be used to describe the form or shape of patterns for of the language was simplified from the complex conjugationThe word conjugation has several meanings: Grammatical conjugation is the modification of a verb from its basic form. In biology, conjugation is sexual reproduction involving interchange of DNA between cells, rather than their fusion. Various forms of con and declension system of Old Persian to the almost completely regularized morphology and rigid syntax of modern Persian, in a manner often described as paralleling the development of English. Additionally, many words were introduced from neighboring languages, including Aramaic and Greek in earlier times, and later Arabic and to a lesser extent Turkish. In more recent times, some Western European words have entered the language (notably from French and English.)
The language itself has greatly developed during the centuries. Due to technological developments new words and idioms are created and enter into Persian like any other language. In Iran the Academy of Persian Language and Literature is a center that evaluates the new words in order to initiate and advise its Persian equivalent. In Afghanistan, the Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan does the same for Afghan Persian (among other languages).
2 Nomenclature
Persian, the more widely used and official name of the language in English, is the Hellenized form of the native term Parsi. Farsi is the Arabicized form of Parsi and its use in the English language is very recent. Native Persian speakers typically call it "Farsi" in modern usage. ISO, the Academy of Persian Language and Literature, and many other authentic sources call the language Persian. The government of Afghanistan uses both "Dari" and Persian in English communications.
The Academy of Persian Language and Literature as well as most linguists and lexicographers, believe that "Farsi" is not the appropriate term used for the Persian language in English. "Farsi" is actually the arabicized form of "Parsi", due to a lack of the /p/ phoneme in Standard Arabic [2].
Incidentally the Persian Wikipedia is sometimes referred to as the Farsi Wikipedia, as the "fa." prefix implies, due to the fact that "fa" is the ISO 639-1 designation for the language.
