4. New Persian.—The last step in the development of the
language is New Persian, represented in its oldest form by Firdousī.
In grammatical forms it is still poorer than Middle
Persian; except English, no Indo-European language
has so few inflexions, but this is made up for by the
subtle development of the syntax. The structure of New Persian
New Persian.
has hardly altered at all since the Shāhnāma; but the original
purism of Firdousī, who made every effort to keep the language
free from Semitic admixture, could not long be maintained. Arabic
literature and speech exercised so powerful an influence on New
Persian, especially on the written language, that it could not
withstand the admission of an immense number of Semitic words.
There is no Arabic word which would be refused acceptance in
good Persian. But, nevertheless, New Persian has remained a
language of genuine Iranian stock.
Among the changes of the sound system in New Persian, as contrasted with earlier periods, especially with Old Persian, the first that claims mention is the change of the tenues k, t, p, c, into g, d, b, z. Thus we have—
| Old Persian or Zend. | Pahlavī. | New Persian. |
| mahrka (death) | mark | marg |
| Thraētaona | Frītūn | Ferīdūn |
| āp (water) | āp | āb |
| hvatō (self) | khōt | khōd |
| raucah (day) | rōj | rūz |
| haca | aj | az. |
A series of consonants often disappear in the spirant; thus—
| Old Persian or Zend. | Pahlavī. | New Persian. |
| kaufa (mountain) | kof | kōh |
| gāthu (place), Z. gātu | gās | gāh |
| cathware (four) | . . . . | cihār |
| bañdaka (slave) | bandak | bandah |
| spāda (army) | . . . . | sipāh |
| dadāmi (I give) . . . . | . . . . | diham. |
Old d and dh frequently become y—
| Old Persian or Zend. | Pahlavī. | New Persian. |
| madhu (wine) | . . . . | mai |
| baodhō (consciousness) | bōd | bōi |
| pādha (foot) | . . . . | pāi |
| kadha (when) | . . . . | kai. |
Old y often appears as j: Zend yāma (glass), New Persian jām; yavan (a youth), New Persian javān. Two consonants are not allowed to stand together at the beginning of a word; hence vowels are frequently inserted or prefixed, e.g. New Persian sitādan or istādan (to stand), root stā, birādar (brother), Zend and Pahlavī brātar.[1]
Amongst modern languages and dialects other than Persian which must be also assigned to the Iranian family may be mentioned:—Modern Dialects.
1. Kurdish, a language nearly akin to New Persian, with which it has important characteristics in common. It is chiefly distinguished from it by a marked tendency to shorten words at all costs, e.g. Kurd. berād (brother) = New Persian birādar; Kurd dim (I give) = New Persian diham; Kurd. spī (white) = New Persian sipēd.
2. Baluch, the language of Baluchistan, also very closely akin to New Persian, but especially distinguished from it in that all the old spirants are changed into explosives, e.g. Baluch vāb (sleep) = Zend hvafna; Baluch kap (slime) = Zend kafa, New Persian kaf; Baluch hapt (seven) = New Persian haft.
3. Ossetic, true Iranian, in spite of its resemblance in sound to the Georgian.[2]
4. Pushtu (less accurately Afghan), which has certainly been increasingly influenced by the neighbouring Indian languages in inflexion, syntax and vocabulary, but is still at bottom a pure Iranian language, not merely intermediate between Iranian and Indian
The position of Armenian remains doubtful. Some scholars attribute it to the Iranian family; others prefer to regard it as a separate and independent member of the Indo-European group. Many words that at first sight seem to prove its Iranian origin are only adopted from the Persian.[3] (K. G.)
II. Modern Persian Literature.—Persian historians are greatly at variance about the origin of their national poetry. Most of them go back to the 5th Christian century and ascribe to one of the Sassanian kings, Bahrām V. (420–439), the invention of metre and rhyme; others mention as author of the first Persian poem a certain Abulhafṣ of Soghd, near Samarḳand. In point of fact, there is no doubt that the later Sassanian rulers fostered the literary spirit of their nation (see Pahlavī). Pahlavī books, however, fall outside of the present subject, which is the literature of the idiom which shaped itself out of the older Persian speech by slight modifications and a steadily increasing mixture of Arabic words and phrases in the 9th and 10th centuries of our era, and which in all essential respects has remained the same for the last thousand years. The death of Hārūn al-Rashīd in the beginning of the 9th century, which marks the commencement of the decline of the caliphate, was at the same time the starting-point of movements for national independence and a national literature in the Iranian dominion, and the common cradle of the two was in the province of Khorāsān, between the Oxus and the Jaxartes. In Merv, a Khorāsānian town, a certain ʽAbbās composed in 809 A.D. (193 A.H.), according to the oldest Earliest Modern biographical writer of Persia, Mahommed ʽAufī, the first real poem in modern Persian, in honour of the Abbāsid prince Mamūn, Hārūn al-Rashid’s son, who had himself a strong predilection for Persia, his mother’s native country, and was, moreover, thoroughly imbued with the freethinking spirit of his age. Soon after this, in 820 (205 A.H.), Ṭahir, who aided Mamun to wrest the caliphate from his brother Amin, succeeded in establishing the first independent Persian dynasty in Khorāsān, which was overthrown in 872 (259 A.H.) by the Ṣaffārids.
The development of Persian poetry under these first native
dynasties was slow. Arabic language and literature had gained
too firm a footing to be supplanted at once by a new literary
idiom still in its infancy; nevertheless the few poets who arose
under the Ṭāhirids and Ṣaffārids show already the germs of the
characteristic tendency of all later Persian literature, which
aims at amalgamating the enforced spirit of Islamism with their
own Aryan feelings, and reconciling the strict deism of the
Mahommedan religion with their inborn loftier and more or less
pantheistic ideas; and we can easily trace in the few fragmentary
verses of men like Ḥanzala, Ḥakīm Fīrūz and Abū Salīk those
Forms of Eastern Poetry.
principal forms of poetry now used in common by
all Mahommedan nations—the forms of the qaṣīda
(the encomiastic, elegiac or satirical poem), the
ghazal or ode (a love-ditty, wine-song or religious hymn), the
rubāʽī or quatrain (our epigram, for which the Persians invented
a new metre in addition to those adopted from the Arabs), and
the mathnawī or double-rhymed poem (the legitimate form for
epic and didactic poetry). The first who wrote such a mathnawī
was Abū Shukūr of Balkh, the oldest literary representative of
the third dynasty of Khorāsān, the Sāmānids, who had been able
in the course of time to dethrone the Ṣaffārids, and to secure the
government of Persia, nominally still under the supremacy of
the caliphs in Bagdad, but in fact with full sovereignty. The
undisputed reign of this family dates from the accession of Amīr
Naṣr II. (913–942; 301–331 A.H.), who, more than any of his
predecessors, patronized arts and sciences in his dominions.
Minstrels of
10th Century.
The most accomplished minstrels of his time were
Mahommed Fārāladī (or Fārālawī); Abū ’l-ʽAbbās
of Bokhārā, a writer of very tender verses; Abū
’l-Mużaffar Naṣr of Nīshāpūr; Abū ʽAbdallāh Mahommed of
Junaid, equally renowned for his Arabic and Persian poetry;
Maʽnawī of Bokhārā, full of original thoughts and spiritual
subtleties; Khusrawānī, from whom even Firdousī condescended
to borrow quotations; Abū ’l-Hasan Shahīd of Balkh, the first
who made a dīwān or alphabetical collection of his lyrics; and
Rūdagī (or Rūdakī), the first classic genius of Persia, who impressed
upon every form of lyric and didactic poetry its peculiar
stamp and individual character (see Rūdagī). His graceful and
captivating style was imitated by Ḥakīm Khabbaz of Nīshāpūr,
a great baker, poet and quack; Abū Shuʽaib Ṣāliḥ of Herāt, who
left a spirited little song in honour of a young Christian maiden;
Raunaqī of Bokhārā; Abū ’l-Fatḥ of Bust, who was also a good
Arabic poet; the amīr Abū ’l-Ḥasan ʽAlī Alagātchī, who handled
the pen as skilfully as the sword; ʽUmāra of Merv, a famous
- ↑ Grammars of New Persian, by M. Lumsden (Calcutta, 1810), A. B. Chodzko (Paris, 1852; new ed. 1883), D. Forbes (1869), J. A. Vullers (Giessen, 1870), A. Wahrmund (Giessen, 1875), C. Salemann and V. Zhukovski (Leipzig, 1889); J. T. Platts (pt. i. 1984). For the New Persian dialects see Fr. Müller, in the Sitzungsber. der wien. Akad., vols. lxxvii., lxxviii.
- ↑ Cf. Hübschmann, in Kuhn’s Zeitschrift, xxiv. 396.
- ↑ Cf. P. de Lagarde, Armenische Studien (Göttingen, 1877); H. Hübschmann, Armenische Studien (Leipzig, 1883).
