Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIII.djvu/338

 324 PERSIA (LANGUAGE AND LITEEATUEE) PERSIA, Language and Literature of. The Per- sian, which for 900 years past has been the cultivated language of Persia, belongs to the Iranic group of the Indo-European languages. The earlier languages of Persia are treated in the article IEANIO RACES AND LANGUAGES. The present cultivated form of speech is called Deri, " court language," in distinction from the pop- ular dialects. According to native authorities, each considerable province has a dialect of its own, and that which is spoken in and about Shiraz and Ispahan approximates most near- ly to the cultivated tongue. Persian is still spoken, not only throughout the present king- dom of Persia, but all over the Iranian terri- tory, and even beyond its borders ; but its prev- alence is different in different regions. About the Caspian it is in great measure crowded out by the dialects of the almost exclusively Turk- ish population. Throughout a great part of Khorasan the Persian is the language of the cities, while the nomadic tribes who occupy the surrounding wastes are of Tartar descent and idiom. In other parts this relation is in a manner reversed; thus, in Afghanistan and Beloochistan the ruling race is of another, though ultimately kindred lineage, while the mass of the agricultural population is made up of Persian-speaking Tajiks. Nearly the same is the case in the southern portions of Turkis- tan or Independent Tartary, an ancient seat of Iranian religion and civilization ; and the Ira- nian population even extends beyond the Bolor Tagh into some of the provinces of eastern Tartary. Conquests, commerce, and culture have combined to carry the Persian language beyond its ancient limits; the subjugation of India by Persian monarchs introduced it as the court language of Delhi, and made Hindostan long a centre of Persian literary culture ; it is but recently that Persian has ceased to be the recognized official language of British India. The Turks have carried it, in a certain way, as far in the opposite direction ; the cultivated Osmanli is full of Persian words and phrases, and its literature is in great part founded upon Persian models. The appearance of the modern Persian language, and the rise of its literature, are contemporaneous with the disintegration of the caliphate of Bagdad, and the resurrection of Persian nationality under native and vir- tually independent sovereigns in the 10th cen- tury. During the three centuries that Persia had lain under the heel of its Mohammedan conquerors, its national independence destroy- ed, its religion and social institutions swept away, it had exercised in virtue of its superior culture a powerful influence upon its oppres- sors, and its scholars had borne a prominent part in starting into life the Moslem literature, philosophy, and science; but not until after the lapse of that interval was there a revivi- fication of elements distinctly Persian. With the latter part of the 10th century, then, be- gins the career of the modern Persian. This is hardly to be considered as the direct lineal | descendant of either of the two ancient dia- lects, the Achaemenian or the Avestan, but it is -more nearly related to the former than to the latter, as is shown by such evidences as the infinitive ending ten, Ach. tanaiy, Av. tee; dest, hand, Ach. dasta, Av. zasta, &c. It is closely connected with the Parsee, and may be con- sidered a slightly modernized form of the Huz- varesh. As an analytical language, exhibit- ing an almost complete breaking down and abandonment of the ancient system of forms and inflections, and the substitution of inde- pendent form-words and connectives, it stands nearly upon a level with the English ; its grammar, in striking contrast with the com- plexity of that of the two ancient dialects, is of the baldest simplicity. It is always written with the Arabic alphabet, to which, however, it has added four signs, to express the sounds p, tch, eh, and g ; on the other hand, eight or nine of the Arabic characters are useless to it, occurring, save in very rare cases, only in Ara- bic words, and being pronounced, like other letters in the alphabet, without the distinctive Arabic utterance. The spoken alphabet is near- ly as follows : vowels, a, e, i, o, u (as to the vowel pronunciation, even of the cultivated dialect, there appears to be much diversity in different regions; the vowels are written, of course, in the very imperfect Semitic fashion, sharing among them only three characters, and generally omitted when short); consonants guttural, Jo, Ich, q, g, gh ; palatal, tch, j ; dental, t, d, n ; labial, p, f, b, m ; semivowels, y, r, I, v; sibilants, s, sh, z, zh ; aspiration, h. The Parsee alphabet is almost precisely the same with this, nor does that of the Huzvaresh pre- sent any difference worthy of notice. All show a near relationship with the systems of sounds of the ancient dialects, differing from them chiefly by the loss of certain aspirates (the den- tal), and by the possession of an 1. In treating of declension, we have first to note the fact that the Persian, like the English, has lost all suffixes and terminations distinguishing gen- der, and that it accordingly agrees with our language in possessing no artificial or gram- matical gender. It is yet poorer than the English in lacking the distinction of gender in the pronoun; it cannot even say "he, she, it;" where a distinction has to be made between masculine and feminine, it employs separate words meaning male and female. The same is the case in the Parsee and Huzvaresh. There are two endings for the plural, an and M, the former a relic of the ancient genitive plural (asp-dn, horses, Av. acpandm, of horses), the latter of the dative and ablative (asp-hd, Av. acpaeibyap, to or from horses; a few Parsee words have the fuller form hyd)-, an is now regularly restricted to animate objects, but in the Parsee is applied to both animate and inanimate, and in the Huzvaresh is the only plural termination. The syllable rd is used as a sign of the accusative (asp-rd) ; it is origi- nally an independent word, meaning " way,"