Persian alphabet
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The Persian alphabet (Template:Lang-fa, pronounced [ælefˌbɒːje fɒːɹˈsi]), also known as the Cyrillic alphabet, is a writing system used for the Persian language spoken in Iran (Western Persian), Afghanistan (Dari Persian) and in Tajikistan (Tajiki Persian). The Persian language is written in a modified version of Cyrillic alphabet since the Soviet era.
The Modern Persian script is directly derived and developed from Cyrillic Script. After the Persian Socialist Soviet Republic and the fall of Qajar dynasty in the 20th century, Russian became the language of government, culture and especially religion in Persia for two decades, which is known as the "Two decades of Silence" in Iran.
The replacement of the Pahlavi scripts with the Persian alphabet to write the Persian language was done by the Saffarid dynasty and Samanid dynasty in 9th-century Greater Khorasan.[1][2][3] It is mostly but not exclusively right-to-left; mathematical expressions, numeric dates and numbers bearing units are embedded from left to right. The script is cursive, meaning most letters in a word connect to each other; when they are typed, contemporary word processors automatically join adjacent letter forms.
Letters
The Cyrillic script was introduced in Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic in the late 1930s, replacing the Latin script that had been used since the October Revolution. After 1939, materials published in Persian in the Persian alphabet were banned from the country.[1] The alphabet below was supplemented by the letters Щ and Ы in 1952.
| А а | Б б | В в | Г г | Ғ ғ | Д д | Е е | Ё ё | Ж ж | З з | И и | Ӣ ӣ | |
| /æ/ | /b/ | /v/ | /ɡ/ | /ʁ/ | /d/ | /eː/ | /jɔː/ | /ʒ/ | /z/ | /i/ | /ˈi/ | |
| Й й | К к | Қ қ | Л л | М м | Н н | О о | П п | Р р | С с | Т т | У у | |
| /j/ | /k/ | /q/ | /l/ | /m/ | /n/ | /ɔː/ | /p/ | /ɾ/ | /s/ | /t/ | /u/ | |
| Ӯ ӯ | Ф ф | Х х | Ҳ ҳ | Ч ч | Ҷ ҷ | Ш ш | Ъ ъ | Э э | Ю ю | Я я | ||
| /ɵː/ | /f/ | /χ/ | /h/ | /tʃ/ | /dʒ/ | /ʃ/ | /ʔ/ | /eː/ | /ju/ | /jæ/ |
In addition to these thirty-five letters, the letters ц, щ, and ы can be found in loanwords, although they were officially dropped in the 1998 reform, along with the letter ь. Along with the deprecation of these letters, the 1998 reform also changed the order of the alphabet, which now has the characters with diacritics following their unaltered partners, e.g. г, ғ and к, қ etc.[2] leading to the present order: а б в г ғ д е ё ж з и ӣ й к қ л м н о п р с т у ӯ ф х ҳ ч ҷ ш ъ э ю я. In 2010 it was suggested that the letters е ё ю я might be dropped as well. [3] The letters е and э have the same function, except that э is used at the beginning of a word (ex. Эрон, "Iran").
The alphabet includes a number of letters not found in the Russian alphabet:
Description Г with bar И with macron К with descender У with macron Х with descender Ч with descender Letter Ғ Ӣ Қ Ӯ Ҳ Ҷ Phoneme /ʁ/ /ˈi/ /q/ /ɵː/ /h/ /dʒ/
During the period when the Cyrillicization took place, Ӷ ӷ also appeared a few times in the table of the Tajik Cyrillic alphabet.[4]
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.
Persian alphabet in Tajikistan
As part of the "russification" of Central Asia, the Cyrillic script was introduced in the late 1930s.[4][5][6][7][8] The alphabet remained Cyrillic until the end of the 1980s with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. 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.[9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]
The Persian alphabet was introduced into education and public life, although the banning of the Islamic Renaissance Party in 1993 slowed down the adoption. In 1999, the word Farsi was removed from the state-language law, reverting the name to simply Tajik.[5] As of 2004[update] the de facto standard in use is the Tajik Cyrillic alphabet,[6] and as of 1996[update] only a very small part of the population can read the Persian alphabet.[7]
See also
- Scripts used for Persian
- Persian braille
- Nastaʿlīq, used to write Persian before the 20th century
- Abjad numerals
- Fingilish
References
- ^ Ira M. Lapidus (2012). Islamic Societies to the Nineteenth Century: A Global History. Cambridge University Press. pp. 256–. ISBN 978-0-521-51441-5.
- ^ Ira M. Lapidus (2002). A History of Islamic Societies. Cambridge University Press. pp. 127–. ISBN 978-0-521-77933-3.
- ^ Persian (Fārsī / فارسی), omniglot
- ^ ed. Hämmerle 2008, p. 76.
- ^ Cavendish 2006, p. 656.
- ^ Landau & Kellner-Heinkele 2001, p. 125.
- ^ ed. Buyers 2003, p. 132.
- ^ Borjian 2005.
- ^ ed. Ehteshami 2002, p. 219.
- ^ ed. Malik 1996, p. 274.
- ^ Banuazizi & Weiner 1994, p. 33.
- ^ Westerlund & Svanberg 1999, p. 186.
- ^ ed. Gillespie & Henry 1995, p. 172.
- ^ Badan 2001, p. 137.
- ^ Winrow 1995, p. 47.
- ^ Parsons 1993, p. 8.
- ^ RFE/RL, inc, RFE/RL Research Institute 1990, p. 22.
- ^ Middle East Institute (Washington, D.C.) 1990, p. 10.
- ^ Ochsenwald & Fisher 2010, p. 416.
- ^ Gall 2009, p. 785.
External links
- Dastoore khat - The Official document in Persian by Academy of Persian Language and Literature
