Persian vocabulary

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Persian language

Regional and social varieties:

Grammar:

Language features:

Writing systems:

Persian belongs to the Indo-European language family, and many words in modern Persian usage ultimately originate from Proto-Indo-European. The language makes extensive use of word building techniques such as affixation and compounding to derive new words from roots. Persian has also had considerable contact with other languages, resulting in many borrowings.

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[edit] Native word formation

Persian is very powerful in word building and versatile in ways a word can be built from combining affixes, stems, nouns and adjectives. Persian frequently uses derivational agglutination to form new words from nouns, adjectives, and verbal stems. New words are extensively formed by compounding – two existing words combining into a new one, as is common in German. Professor Mahmoud Hessaby demonstrated that Persian can derive 226 million words.[1]

An example set of words derived from a present stem combined with some of available affixes:

Persian Components English Word class
dān dān Present stem of dânestan (to know) Verbal stem
dāneš dān + -eš knowledge Noun
dānešmand dān + -eš + -mand Scientist Noun
dānešgâh dān + -eš + -gâh university Noun
dānešgâhi dān + -eš + -gāh + -i pertaining to university; scholar; scholarly Adjective
hamdānešgāhi ham- + dān + -eš + -gāh + -i university-mate Noun
dāneškade dān + -eš + -kade faculty Noun
dānā dān + -ā wise, learned Adjective
dānāyi dān + -ā + -i wisdom Noun
nādān nā- + dān ignorant; foolish Adjective
nādāni nā- + dān + -i ignorance; foolishness Noun
dānande dān + -ande one who knows Adjective
dānandegi dān + -ande + -i knowing Noun

An example set of words derived from a past stem combined with some of available affixes:

Persian Components English Word class
did ديد did Past stem of didan (to see) Verbal stem
did ديد did sight; vision Noun
didan ديدن did + -an to see Infinitive
didani ديدني did + -an + -i worth seeing Adjective
didār ديدار did + -ār visit; act of meeting Noun
didāri ديداري did + -ār + -i visional, of the sense of sight Adjective
dide did + -e seen; what seen Past participle; Noun
nādide nâ- + did + -e what unseen Noun
didgāh did + -gâh point of view Noun
didebān dide + -bān watchman Noun
didebāni dide + -bān + -i watchman-ship Noun


[edit] External influences

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 [2], 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. 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 ketāb (كتاب) ["book"] is kutub (كتب) 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 كنابها). 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.

[edit] French/European influence

Over the past couple of centuries, Persian has borrowed many loanwords from European languages, the majority of these words come from clothing, ultilities and modern technology. A lot of these loanwords were originally French and use French pronunciation, also other common words mainly come from English, Italian and German as well. The table below shows some examples of common French/Persian words.

Farsi French English
douche douche shower
mersi merci thank you
manteaux manteaux women's coat
chauffage chauffage radiator
sèche-cheveux sèche-cheveux hairdryer
cheminées cheminées fireplace
otobus autobus bus
chic chic
cravate cravate tie
sák sac bag
papillon papillon bow

[edit] See also

Look up Indo-Iranian Swadesh lists in
Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

[edit] References

  1. ^ FAREIRAN.COM / فرايران
  2. ^ Sorry, that module file was not found