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Rh 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

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— A series of consonants often disappear in the spirant; thus— Old d and dh frequently become y— 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.

Amongst modern languages and dialects other than Persian which must be also assigned to the Iranian family may be mentioned:—

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.

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.

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 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 (193 ), according to the oldest

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 ), 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 ) 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

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 ), who, more than any of his predecessors, patronized arts and sciences in his dominions.

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 ). 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