PERSIAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. The ancient and modern idioms of Per sia, which are in general designated as Iranian or West Aryan, belong to the great class of the Indo-Germanic languages; but the term Persian itself applies more particularly to the language as it is now spoken, with a few exceptions, throughout Persia, and in a few other places, formerly under Persian dominion, like Bokhara, etc The more impor tant and better known of the ancient idioms are (1) the Zend (the East Iranian or Bactrian I.,nguage, in two dialects—the " Giltha idiom," and the "ancient" or "classical Zend "), which died out in the 3(1 c. The.—one of the most highly developed idioms, rich in hake thins. in the verbs as well as in the nouns, and.in the former almost completely agreeing with Vedic Sanskrit; yet such as we find it in the small remains which have survived, it is no longer in the full vigor of life, but almost decaying, and grammatically somewhat neglected; it is'in fact held by a great authority on the subject. (Hang), that the grammar was never fixed in any way by rules. To increase the difficulty still more, the texts— the Zoroastrian books—never seem to have been copied with proper care, or by men who had any correct knowledge of the language; so that the critical restoration of the liter ary remains is matter of extreme difficulty, and Zend studies in general may lie said to be in their infancy yet. Geographically, this idiom may be placed in northern Persia. Its alphabet is of Semitic origin, andjhe writing goes from right to left (see ZEND, Zrsai AvEsTA). (2) Ancient Pr!rsittn, the cief remnants of which are found in the cuneiform inscriptions of the time of the Achaemenides, discovered in the ruins of Persepolis. on the rock of Behistun, and some other places of Persia (see CUNEIFORM). Some relics, chiefly consisting of proper names for gods and men, and terms for vessels and gar ments, have survived in the writings of the classical period, and in the Bible, chiefly in Daniel. This idiom is much nearer to and and Sanskrit than to modern Persian. It has still the structure of an ancient organic Indo-Germanic language, with the distinct peculiarities of an bailie tongue, (3) Pcbleri (q.v.) (West Iranian, Median, and Per sian), in use during the period of the Sassanides (3d to 7th an idiom largely mixed with Semitic words, and poorer in inflections and terminations than Zend. Its remnants consist of a certain number of books relating to the Zoroastrian religion, of coins and inscriptions; and the language is not quite the same in all cases—according to the larger or smaller infusioa of foreign words. The non-Iranian element is known as Iluzvaresh, and is simply Clualdee; while the Iranian element is but little different from modern Persian. There are three distinct idioms to lie distinguished in Pehlevi, and the writing varies accordingly. yet it is not certain whether the difference arises from their belonging to different districts or periods. When, however, Pelderi ceased to lie a liv hug language. and the restoration of the pure Iranian had begun, people, not daring to change the writings, chiefly of a sacred nature, as they had descended to them from the Sassanian times. began to substitute, in reading, the Persian equivalents to the Huzvar esh words. At last a new form of commentaries to the sacred writings sprang up, in which more distinct and clear Zend characters were used, where each sign has lint one pho netical value, and where all the foreign Huzvaresh words were replaced by pure Persian ones; and this new form was called (4) Pazcnd, The transition from the ancient to the modern Persian is formed by the' Parsee, or. as the Arabs call it, Farsi, in use from 700
to 1100 A.D., once the language purely of the sou.114% astern provinces, and distinguished chiefly by a peculiarity of style, rigid exclusion of Semitic words, and certain now obso lete forms and words retained in liturgic formulaS. It is the Persian once written by the Parsees or fire-worshipers, and is in other respects very similar to the present or mod ern Persian, the language of Jrimi, Nizumi, and Hafiz—from 1100 to the present time its numerous dialects. The purest dialect is said to be that spoken in Shiraz and Ispahan and their neighborhood. In general, the language is pronounced by universal consent to be the richest and most elegant of those spoken in modern Asia. It is the most sonorous and muscular, while at the same time it is the most elegant and most flexible of idioms; and it is not to be wondered at that, throughout the Moslem and Hindu realm, it should have become the court language, and that of the educated world in gmeral; holding a position somewhat similar to that which the French language held up to within a recent period in Europe. Its chief characteristic, however, is the enor mous intermixture of Arabic words, which, indeed, almost make up half its vocabulary Respecting its analytical and grammatical structure, it exhibits traces only of that of the ancient dialects of Zend and Aclimmenian, of which it is a direct descendant. The elaborate system of forms and inflections characteristic of those dialects has been utterly abandoned for combinations of auxiliary words, which form independent connective links, and which impart fullness and an incredible ease to speech and composition, but which, at the same time, correspond as little to the classical notion of inflection. The grammar of the Persian language has been called "regular;" but the fact is, that there is hardly any grillnmar worth mentioning—at all events, no grammar the rules of which could not be mastered in the briefest possible period. To begin with: there is no gen. der distinguished in declension; the plural is always formed in the same manner, the only distinction consists iu animate beings receiving the affix an, while the inanimate are terminated in /di; further, that instead of the inflection in the different cases found in the ancient languages, either a mar (hitherto unexplained) is prefixed, or a ra (rah = way, by reason of, Pehlevi, Parsi) is affixed. Between the genitive and the word which governs it, also between a noun and its following adjective, an i is inserted. This is the whole declension, not only of the noun, but also of the adjective and pronoun. The comparative is formed, as in the mother-tongues, by the addition of ter; the superlative adds feria, which is New-Persian . Not even the pronouns have a gender of their own; the distinction between masculine and feminine must be expressed by a special word, denoting male or female. There is no article, either definite or indefinite.