Turkmenistan. Many of the Iranian immigrants in
North America and eUrope also continue to speak
Persian.
Persian is classified as an Indo-European
language by linguists, which means that it is his-
torically related both to the languages of North
india and pakistan (including Sanskrit, Hindi,
and Urdu) and to those of Europe and the Ameri-
cas (including English, German, Spanish, and
French). It is written in the Arabic script with
an additional four letters to convey consonants
that are not found in Arabic (p, ch, zh, and g).
Although there are thousands of Arabic loanwords
in Persian, it is not classified as a Semitic language
because of its sentence structure, grammar, and
native vocabulary. The kinship of Persian with
Euro-American languages can be readily seen in
words like pedar (English father, Spanish padre,
and French père), madar (English mother, Spanish
madre, and French mère), and dar (English door,
German Tür). The Arabic equivalents to these
words are quite different: abu or walid, umm or
walida, and bab.
The Persian language has evolved in three chief
stages. The earliest to have left textual evidence
is known as Old Persian, the official language
of the Achaemenid Empire that ruled Iran from
ca. 539 to ca. 330 b.c.e. It has been found only
in royal inscriptions written in cuneiform char-
acters adapted from the civilizations of ancient
Mesopotamia. The eastern branch of this language
included Avestan, which was the ancient language
of the sacred texts of the Zoroastrian religion. Old
Persian was replaced by Middle Persian after the
fall of the Achaemenids. It was written in what is
known as the Pahlavi script (adapted from Ara-
maic) and used during the reign of the Sasanian
dynasty of Iran and adjacent lands between 224
c.e. and 651 c.e., although many Middle Persian
texts were written later during the early centuries
of Islam. Middle Persian was used in the writ-
ing of Zoroastrian literature, wisdom texts, and
court poetry. Modern Persian (also called New
Persian), the language still used today, emerged in
the aftermath of the conquests of Persian lands by
Arab armies in the seventh and eighth centuries.
It overlapped with Middle Persian and expressed
the colloquial dialect. It was (and still is) written
in Arabic script, with the earliest Modern Persian
texts dating back to the 10th century. The interac-
tion of Persian and Arabic speakers resulted in the
appropriation of hundreds of Arabic loanwords
into Modern Persian, but only a few Persian words
have survived in the Arabic language.
Many of the major scholars who arose during
the era of the abbasid caliphate (750–1258) were
Persian, or of Persian descent, but they wrote
mostly in Arabic. These included the historian
and Quran commentator Muhammad ibn Jarir
al-Tabari (838–923), and a number of major col-
lectors of Sunni hadith: Muhammad al-Bukhari
(810–870), Abu Dawud (818–888), and ibn maJa
(824–887). The foremost Arabic grammarian Sib-
awayh (d. ca. 793), the philosopher ibn sina
(979–1037), the noted astronomer and geog-
rapher abU rayhan al-birUni (d. 1051), and
the renowned Sunni theologian and mystic abU
hamid al-ghazali (1058–1111) were all Persians
who wrote mostly if not entirely in Arabic. One’s
reputation as a scholar of religion, history, and
the fine arts in general depended upon one’s com-
mand of Arabic at this time.
The roots of an indigenous Persian literary
tradition have been traced to poetic passages in
Middle Persian Zoroastrian hymns and the oral
traditions of the gosans, Persian minstrels, like
Barbad and Sarkash. It was further influenced
by Indian literature during the Sasanian era.
Traces of these literary traditions survived both
in Modern Persian and Arabic translations. The
weakening of Abbasid hegemony and the emer-
gence of Turkish dynasties in eastern Islamicate
lands during the 10th and 11th centuries led to a
Persian-language literary renaissance. Turkish rul-
ers patronized Persian court poets who composed
works that praised them, extolled courtly life,
and told tales that interwove romantic and heroic
themes. Modern Persian, with deep vernacularK (^550) Persian language and literature