{"id":53,"date":"2008-06-26T16:15:47","date_gmt":"2008-06-26T21:15:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.la.utexas.edu\/persian_online_resources\/?page_id=53"},"modified":"2009-05-07T09:19:43","modified_gmt":"2009-05-07T15:19:43","slug":"the-writing-system","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.la.utexas.edu\/persian_online_resources\/the-writing-system\/","title":{"rendered":"The Writing System"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Originally a <strong>Semitic<\/strong> writing system, the modern day <strong>Perso-Arabic<\/strong> script has retained two essential features:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It is written from <strong>right to left<\/strong> (compare it, for example, with Hebrew, another Semitic script). In Arabic this writing system has 28 characters; in Persian, 32 (as there are no <em>p<\/em>, <em>ch<\/em>, <em>zh<\/em>, and <em>g<\/em>, in Arabic). With the addition of the <em>hamze<\/em> (the glottal stop, which is exclusively used in the transcription of the loan-words from Arabic) there are 33 characters in Persian.<\/li>\n<li>It is a consonantal writing system; that is, a system in which the short vowels are not included.  Instead, <strong>diacritics<\/strong> may be used above or below a character to apply a short vowel to it.  However, these diacritics are hardly ever used, with the exception of the holy <em>Qur\u0101n<\/em>, which is supposed to be read properly (i.e., with words pronounced correctly), otherwise it would lose its magical and spiritual powers.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In addition, Persian shares a particular feature with many other <strong>Indo-European<\/strong> languages: the historical orthography\u2014that is, spelling words in their original and historical pronounced\/written form, regardless of the later developments. Compare that with the English spelling of words such as &#8216;daughter,&#8217; instead of the hypothetical spelling of the word as <em>dawter<\/em> for instance, because at one time, this was how the word was pronounced (compare with the German <em>tochter<\/em> and Persian <em>doxtar<\/em>). Also compare English &#8216;light&#8217; and German &#8216;<em>licht<\/em>,&#8217; which reflect the presence of a voiceless velar fricative of some sort at some stage of the development of the word. Such Persian words as <span class=\"persian-script\">\u062e\u0648\u0627\u0647\u0631<\/span> <em>xw\u0101har<\/em> (pronounce <em>x\u0101har<\/em>) reflect an earlier \/<em>w<\/em>\/ between the \/<em>x<\/em>\/ and \/<em>\u0101<\/em>\/. This \/<em>w<\/em>\/ is still pronounced in some northern Iranian dialects, such as the <strong>Dari<\/strong> of Afghanistan, etc.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, the Arabic loanwords are spelled as they are written in Arabic, but they are pronounced according to the Persian phonetic system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Originally a Semitic writing system, the modern day Perso-Arabic script has retained two essential features: It is written from right to left (compare it, for example, with Hebrew, another Semitic script). In Arabic this writing system has 28 characters; in Persian, 32 (as there are no p, ch, zh, and g, in Arabic). With the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":289,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":92,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-53","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.la.utexas.edu\/persian_online_resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.la.utexas.edu\/persian_online_resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.la.utexas.edu\/persian_online_resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.la.utexas.edu\/persian_online_resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/289"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.la.utexas.edu\/persian_online_resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/sites.la.utexas.edu\/persian_online_resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/53\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4250,"href":"https:\/\/sites.la.utexas.edu\/persian_online_resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/53\/revisions\/4250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.la.utexas.edu\/persian_online_resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}