#caravanlanguagesfarsi

Hey! We’re about to jump into Persian grammar. We’re keeping it light, so we’re going to talk about grammatical gender in Persian. 

Just a heads up before that, we will be following this spelling convention: http://www.jahanshiri.ir/fa/en/alphabet (This is also an excellent Persian grammar resource.) Bit of linguistics terminology: we’re not using the IPA despite it being more accurate, as that would limit accessability of these lessons

Firstly, unlike a lot of languages like French or Italian, Persian grammar is genderless. This means that words don’t have a masculine or feminine form [in verbs, adjectives and pronouns], exactly like English.

When talking about human beings: So what this means is that words like دانشجو (dâneshju, meaning student) which are not having a gender, we can attach other words at the end if we want to refer to a student who’s a girl, or a boy.

If you’re keen eyed, you might have already picked up that pesar means boy, and you would be correct! We can ignore the -ye part for now, and explain that in a later lesson.

There are four suffixes:

mard (man)

zan (woman)

pesar (boy)

dokhtar (girl)

When talking about animals: You can add the suffixes:

Nar (male)

Mâdde (female)

Exceptions? Sometimes there are words for both genders instead:

Recap:

So today we covered gender in Persian nouns

How to make a neutral noun masculine or feminine

Depending on if it’s an animal, or a person

Hello everyone! We’re going to be covering verbs very soon in Farsi, and I ended up making a list of:

- the most 65 most common verbs in persian (complete with memorisation charts) - suffixes for the simple past, present perfect and simple perfect tenses (and exceptions) - conjugation charts that you can print out

Here’s the link! As another really good resource for persian verbs, check out the tumblr @persian-verbs run by a member of our farsi team!

congrats! You’ve gotten through the Persian script. This week we’re going to give you some vocab as reading practice and for memorisation!

Family members: Mother (madar) /formal/ مادر Mom (maman) /informal/ مامان Father (pedar) /formal/ پدر Dad (baba) /informal/ بابا Sister (khahar) خواهر Brother (baradar) برادر

Basic words: Yes (Bale) /formal/ بله Yeah (Are) /informal/ آره No (kheir) /formal/ خير Nope (na) /informal/ نه

Persian is an Indo-European language spoken by 45-60ish million people natively and up to 120 million as a second language. It’s an official language in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, but has additional speakers not only in surrounding countries such as Uzbekistan, but also in numerous diaspora populations in the U.S. and Europe (most prominently Los Angeles, London/Manchester, Paris, and Frankfurt).

As a member of the Indo-European family it specifically descends from the Iranian branch, where it is the largest member, the others being Pashto, Kurdish, and Balochi. It is also closely related with the Indo-Aryan family, which contains some of the most widely-spoken languages in the Indian Subcontinent such as Hindi/Urdu, Punjabi, and Bengali. Owing to its status as the language of the courts for hundreds of years across vast expanses of territory, Persian has been extremely influential to numerous languages in the region, contributing significant amounts of vocabulary to Urdu, Punjabi, Pashto, and more. It is written with a modified version of the Arabic script in Iran and Afghanistan, but in modified Cyrillic in Tajikistan, owing to its status as Soviet territory until the breakup of the U.S.S.R.

While many Iranian languages have only begun to be written in the last couple hundred years, Persian has a literary history extending back to the Behistun inscription—an account of Darius the Great’s reign—carved into Mount Behistun in a variety of cuneiform around 500 BC. After the fall of the Achaemenid dynasty there was a period of little-to-no Persian literature, until the resurgence of the Persian empire in the form of the Sasanian Empire. Here it used a non-cuneiform script most likely descended from Aramaic, and showed a collapse of the Old Iranian case system and a restructuring of the verbal system. Then the Sasanian Empire slowly weakened and was eventually taken over by the Rashidun caliphate to the west. While caliphates tended to show decidedly monolingual policies in the rest of their empire and often led to the extinction of regional languages, the rise of the Samanid empire saw its reinstatement as an official language. This newer variety—fittingly called “New Persian”—used the Arabic script and possessed numerous Arabic loanwords, but was still unmistakably an Iranian language. New Persian developed a significant literary corpus, with some of the world’s most famous poets such as Hafez, Rumi, Sa’adi, and one of the world’s largest epic poems, the Shahname. It is also here where it expanded eastward, and Persian once again established itself as a major regional power.

Though its role as a regional lingua franca has often been superseded by colonial languages such as English, Persian influence is still found everywhere. Learning Persian not only allows one to better understand the countries where it has official status, but also gives a noticeable leg up for other languages in the area due to shared vocabulary. It has an extensive literary tradition spanning over a millennium, and some of the world’s most famous poetry.

So, we have 5 letters to learn today. They don’t all share the exact same shape, but they are quite similar. So, here they are:

د ذ ر ز ژ

This time, we’ll actually start with the first letter: د. This one is called dâl, and makes the sound “d”. It’s very common, occuring extensively in both native Persian words and loanwords. Now we need to talk about its forms, because it’s a bit unique compared to the letters we’ve covered so far:

د د- ـد- ـد

One of the first things you’ll notice is that it doesn’t really have an initial form. This is because د does not connect to the letter after it like all of the other letters we’ve learned do. It does connect to the letter before it though, but the form doesn’t really noticeably change at all; you just kind of add a line to the bottom of it. Now, I can actually give a real Persian word as an example!

اَدات

In case it’s not clear, the line above the alef there marks “a”, that isn’t an alef madd. So this is read as “adât”, and means “instrument” or “tool”. In all honestly, it’s not very common, so it’s probably best not to try and memorize this one, but be proud that you can read it!

Next up on the list is ذ, called “zâl”. This makes the sound “z”. Like the letters ث and ح which we’ve learned previously, ذ only occurs in Arabic loanwords. Even then, it’s not very common. I can’t really think of any example words you can read yet, so sorry about that.

But don’t worry, now we’re hitting another really common one: ر re! This is pronounced as “r”, but not the English “r”: in fact, it has multiple possible pronunciations. At the beginning of a word, it can either be pronounced as a trill (like in Spanish “perro”) or as a tap (like the “tt” in the American pronunciation of “little”). Elsewhere, it’s basically always a tap. But, like any other letter, it can take a tashdid and be lengthened, in which case it sounds like a trill. So, for all the time I spent explaining pronunciation, there’s not a whole lot to explain regarding the forms. Like د and ذ before it, it doesn’t connect to the letter after it.

ر ر- ـر- ـر

One thing that might be difficult at first, however, is telling the difference between د and ر, especially in small fonts. Remember those pieces of paper that teachers in early elementary school would give you to learn how to write, with lines everywhere so you know where to write the letters? Imagine a bottom line where most letters are supposed to end. While د stays on that line and doesn’t dip below, ر goes way down below that line. In addition, it’s much more curvy and less angular than د. In handwriting, though, one very common thing that happens is that ر is written as just a diagonal line:

While د is just a wedge (see the second letter to the right):

Hopefully with practice you should be able to easily distinguish the two. Now, we have a new letter, ز ze. This one is pronounced “z”, like ذ. You heard me right, both letters have the exact same pronunciation. The difference is, though, ز is by far the more common letter to represent this sound, occurring in tons of native words and loanwords alike. You see, ذ in Arabic is actually pronounced like the “th” in “this”, and as it used to be in very early New Persian. However, it eventually merged pronunciation with “z”. Meanwhile, even in Arabic, ز is just pronounced like a normal z. And seeing as it’s such a common letter, I can give you another example word:

زَرد

This means “yellow”. And now, our last letter for this lesson: ژ zhe. This is pronounced like the “si” in “vision” or the last consonant sound in “beige”. This letter was actually created specifically for use in Persian, and doesn’t occur in Arabic at all. It’s also not super common, so because of that I can’t give an example word that doesn’t also contain letters you don’t know. And, that concludes this week’s letters. Now try out the exercise and make sure you still remember letters from the last 2 lessons.

READING PRACTICE: transliterate these possibly gibberish, possibly real words. (Real words are italicized):

So, our first letter is ع, called “‘eyn”. It makes the sound of a glottal stop, like the pause in the word “uh-oh” or the “t” in “mountain” in fast speech for many English speakers. But, it is worth noting that outside of regular speech, the pronunciation can change and affect surrounding vowels. Here are some rules

1. When ع is at the beginning of a word, it’s often silent in the spoken language.

2. When it comes after a vowel and before a consonant (like بَعد “after”), the glottal stop disappears and to compensate the vowel is held for longer.

Anyways, forms. This is a letter that changes quite a lot in its different forms, so pay attention.

Pay attention to how the medial form is black, as if it was filled in. And in case you need to review these more, luckily there’s a new letter with the exact same ones: غ gheyn. So this letter makes a sound very similar to the French and German “r”. But really, I feel the best advice is to hear it coming from a native speaker (AKA not me), so check out this video.

ع عـ ـعـ ـع

Next up we have ف, pronounced “fe”. It’s pronounced just like “f”, no extra pronunciation tips needed. Here are its forms:

ف فـ ـفـ ـف

And then we have a similar, but not identical letter called ق qâf. In Iranian Persian, this is pronounced the same as غ. For Afghan and Tajik varieties, it’s pronounced as the IPA [q] (voiceless uvular stop): essentially a k pushed towards the uvula. Pay attention to the isolated and final forms here:

ق قـ ـقـ ـق

Our final 2 letters come in pairs: ک and گ, kâf and gâf. These make the sounds k and g respectively. One important difference in pronunciation is that before the vowels “a” (remember, like in “cat”), “e”, and “i”, they’re both pronounced with a y after them. For example, listen to this recording of the word “digar” and notice how it sounds almost like “digyar”.

ک کـ ـکـ ـک

گ گـ ـگـ ـگ

Alright, we have now reached the length of a normal lesson. To take a break from new material, here are some exercises. Try to read these words aloud:

اَعضا، فِکر، غُبار، قَفقاز، گَرد، اَبداع، غَذا

Alright, now we have 3 letters left. These all have weird forms, so pay attention. First up is ل, called lâm and read as “L”. In American English, we have what’s called “dark l”, meaning that the back of the tongue is scrunched up when we pronounce it. In Persian, however, “L” is never dark. For example, pay attention to the pronunciation of گُل in this clip.

ل لـ ـلـ ـل

One thing that may stick out is that it seems very similar to our friend alef in the initial and medial forms. After all, they’re both sticks. But remember that ل always connects to the letter after it, while alef never does. For example:

عِلم

عام

You’re probably wondering what that last letter is: that’s the perfect segway for our next letter, م mim! It sounds like an “m”, and also have some pretty interesting forms.

م مـ ـمـ ـم

While it is pretty easy to see where the forms come from, it’s just a very unique-looking letter and we haven’t seen anything like it before. As you can imagine, م is exceedingly common (as are ل and the upcoming last letter), so these forms will look totally normally to you in no time.

And finally, the last letter of the day, ن, “nun”, read as an “n”. Its forms are very similar to a group of letters we’ve covered before, with one key difference.

ن نـ ـنـ ـن

The medial and initial forms are the same shape as letters like ب or ت: the difference is that the medial and final form is shorter, fatter, and dips below everything else.

Alright, next week we have just 3 letters left, and then we’re done covering the alphabet and can move onto grammar! First though, practice everything you’ve learned today.

Welcome to the first Farsi/Persian lesson! We’re gonna be kicking it off with the script and spending a good bit of time on that. Throughout there’ll be a lot of example words to demonstrate the script: don’t feel obligated to memorize any of these yet, but you can pick some of the important ones and try to learn them as you go. Also, note any pronunciation approximations I give will be according to American English, not British English. Anyways, onto the actual lesson.