Persian vocabulary

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Persian language
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There are many loanwords in the Persian language, mostly coming from Arabic, English, French, and the Turkic languages.

Persian has likewise influenced the vocabularies of other languages, especially Arabic [1], Indo-Iranian languages and Turkic languages. Many Persian words have also found their way into the English language.

[edit] Arabic influence

The Islamic conquest of Iran lasted for two centuries, from the 7th to the 9th CE. Arabic gradually was replaced with Pahlavi and as the Pahlavi books translated into Arabic by newly-converted Iranians, Arabic became the language of the intellectuals: Writers, poets and philosophers, as well as people in the administration chose to speak and write in Arabic.

During this period, many Arabic words were imported into the Persian language and many Persian words found their way into Arabic. Since the mid-80s, there has been an Arabic resurgence by the Islamic Regime in Iran. Most of the prominent members of the Islamic regime and clerics in Iran are of non-Iranian descent, which has caused a considerable number of new Arabic entering Persian. The new-loanwords have also been added to the lexicon of the language. For a computational analysis of Persian, all these "new" Arabic loans have to be included in the dictionary.

Arabic has had an extensive influence on the Persian lexicon, but it has not really affected the structure of the language. Although a considerable portion of the lexicon is derived from Arabic roots, including some of the Arabic plural patterns, the morphological process used to obtain these lexical elements has not been imported into Persian and it is not productive in the language.

These Arabic words have been imported and lexicalized in Persian. So, for instance, the Arabic plural form for ketâb is kotob obtained by the root derivation system. In Persian, the plural for the lexical word ketâb obtained by just adding the Persian plural morpheme (ketāb+hā --> ketābhā). Any new Persian words, however, can only be pluralized by the addition of the plural morpheme since the Arabic root system is not a productive process in Persian.

In addition, since the plurals formed by the Arabic morphological system constitute only a small portion of the Persian vocabulary (about 5% in the Shiraz corpus), it is not necessary to include them in the morphology; they are instead listed in the dictionary as irregular forms.

On the other hand, among educated Persians, there have been sporadic efforts as far back as the tenth century to diminish the use of Arabic loanwords in their language. Both Pahlavi shahs supported such efforts in the twentieth century. Since the Revolution, a contrary tendency to increase the use of Arabic words in both spoken and written Persian has emerged among government leaders.