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Persian is a member of the Western Iranian group of the Iranian languages, which make up a branch of the Indo-European languages in their Indo-Iranian subdivision.The Western Iranian languages themselves are divided into two subgroups: Southwestern Iranian languages, of which Persian is the most widely spoken, and Northwestern Iranian languages, of which Kurdish and Balochi are the most widely ...
Old Persian is one of two directly attested Old Iranian languages (the other being Avestan) and is the ancestor of Middle Persian (the language of the Sasanian Empire). Like other Old Iranian languages, it was known to its native speakers as ariya (Iranian). [1][2] Old Persian is close to both Avestan and the language of the Rig Veda, the ...
The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya, Aramaic, Hebrew, Maltese and numerous other ancient and modern languages. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, North Africa, [ a ] the Horn of Africa, [ b ][ c ] Malta, [ d ] and in large immigrant ...
The term Persian, meaning "from Persia", derives from Latin Persia, itself deriving from Greek Persís (Περσίς), [ 24 ] a Hellenized form of Old Persian Pārsa (𐎱𐎠𐎼𐎿), which evolves into Fārs (فارس) in modern Persian. [ 25 ] In the Bible, particularly in the books of Daniel, Esther, Ezra, and Nehemya, it is given as ...
History of Iran. The history of Iran (or Persia, as it was known in the Western world) is intertwined with Greater Iran, a sociocultural region spanning from Anatolia to the Indus River and from the Caucasus to the Persian Gulf. Central to this area is modern-day Iran, which covers the bulk of the Iranian plateau.
Educated Ottoman Turks spoke Arabic and Persian, as these were the main foreign languages in the pre-Tanzimat era, with the former being used for science and the latter for literary affairs. [25] The spread of the Persian language through Rumi shrines made it the dialect of the Sufism. The Ottomans promoted and supported the Persian language.
Following the adoption of Islam c. 950 by the Kara-Khanid Khanate and the Seljuq Turks, regarded as the cultural ancestors of the Ottomans, the administrative and literary languages of these states acquired a large collection of loanwords from Arabic (usually by way of Persian), as well as non-Arabic Persian words: a leading example of a Perso ...
Genuine Old Persian is best attested in one of the three languages of the Behistun inscription, composed c. 520 BCE, and which is the last inscription (and only inscription of significant length) in which Old Persian is still grammatically correct. Later inscriptions are comparatively brief, and typically simply copies of words and phrases from ...