The Persian Language and its Development in the new era
Dr. Ali Akbar Abedian Kasgari
Synopsis "The Persian Language and its Development in the new era"
One of the main events of the second millennium BC was the migration of people with Aryan origins to the Iranian plateau and the Indian-subcontinent. Although there are scholars who strongly reject the topic of the Aryans' migration and ascribe it as the basis for ethnic propaganda in favor of the European fascism, a historical review of this book is prepared with regard to the popular opinion of the Aryans' migration to these regions. Based on the migration idea, after this event, Indo-European language groups were formed, and the group of Iranian languages gradually stemmed out of the Indo-Iranian family, as one of the sub-groups of the Indo-European language groups. Iranian languages besides to the Iranian Plateau became native to the parts of the Caucasus, and much of Central Asia, which belonged to the Iranian cultural domain until medieval times. Based on historical divisions, linguists assign Iranian languages into three periods: Ancient Era, Medieval Era, and New Era. The distinct development in the transformation of the Ancient Era to the Medieval Era was changing of the synthetic form of the Ancient Era to an analytic form in the Medieval Era: nouns, pronouns, and adjectives lost their case inflections; prepositions were used to indicate the different roles of words, and many tenses began to be formed from a composite form.The development in the transformation of the Medieval Era to the New Era was very gradual. With the formation of the New Persian in the New Era, especially within its early phase, Persian continued its improvement. This important early phase of the New Persian is called the Early New Persian, due to the importance of this period, the emphasis of this book is to explain the New Era, principally the Early New Persian.During the Early New Persian, although definite differences had taken place by the 10th century and sound changes such as the dropping of unstressed initial vowels, the epenthesis of vowels in initial consonant clusters, the loss of -g when word finals and change of initial w- to either b- or (gw- → g-) have occurred, Middle Persian texts were still intelligible to speakers of New Persian in the early phase. When Early New Persian continued, to adapt more conformances, Persian received the following alterations: changes in the verbal system, notably the loss of distinctive subjunctive and optative forms; changes in the vocabulary, particularly the establishment of a superstratum or adstratum of Arabic loanwords replacing many Aramaic loans and native terms, and the substitution of Arabic script for Pahlavi script.
