A History of the Persian Language
This book studies history and characteristics of the Persian language from the ancient times to the present, it analyzes the Iranian languages, too. In this book there are also sample texts of ancient and Middle Persian languages with their phonetics and meanings. This book studies Persian language under three categories of ancient period, Middle period and contemporary period.
The first part of the book studies the Persian language in the ancient time. This period starts withthe arrival of first Iranians to Iran about a thousand years before Christ, and ends with the downfall of the Achaemeninas. This part comprises the following topics: Indo-European languages; ancient Iran; ancient Iranian languages; the grammatical characteristics of the ancient Persian language; alphabet in the ancient period; the vocabulary of the ancient Iranian languages; poetry and meter in ancient Iran; and some samples of ancient texts. The second part deals with the Middle Persian language. This period begins with the downfall of the Achaemenians to the establishment of the Safavid dynasty. In this part the problems below are addressed: Middle Iran; the Middle Iranian languages; alphabet in the Middle Iran; grammatical characteristics of western Middle Iranian languages; the vocabulary of the western Middle Iranian languages; lexicons and phonetics of the Western Middle Iranian texts; some sample texts from the Western Middle Iranian languages; and poetry in the Western Middle Iran. The third part of the book is devoted to the contemporary era which commences with the Safavid dynasty and continues to the present time. The contemporary Iran; contemporary languages of Iran; grammatical
characteristics of Farsi Dari; the vocabularies of Farsi Dari; meter in Farsi Dari; alphabet in Farsi Dari. Each part attends to a different sort of Iranian and Persian languages, grammatical features, alphabet, vocabulary and poetry. The book also contains some sample texts from the prose and poetry of the period along with their translations.
Suggested for the BA students of Persian language and literature for a course in “A history of Persian Languages” and also for the students of ancient Iranian languages and general linguistics, this book studies history and characteristics of the Persian language under three categories of ancient period, middle period and contemporary period.