Persian or Farsi?
There are two names for this language - Persian and Farsi. When I first began to study the language, I encountered these two name and wondered if they referred to the same thing or if they had slightly different meanings, and so I decided to do some research to find out which term was more appropriate.
Around 648 BCE there was a tribe of the people who called themselves the Aryans and ruled a large territory that today would encompass Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, Syria, Armenia, and parts of Egypt. They called this territory Iran- meaning land of the Aryans. The native name of their language was "Parsik" or "Parsig" after the name of an ethnic group, belonging to the Aryans, that lived in southwestern Iran. They had many battles with the Greeks, who referred to these people as Perses. This word traveled through Europe, entered the Latin language, and eventually was anglicized as Persians, which is how it entered the English language. The Western world referred to this country, (which lost more and more territory) as Persia, and to the language as Persian. Thus, two names existed at the same time: the west used Persian, and the natives used Farsi (the name changed from Parsik, to Parsi, and finally during the Arabic invasion it became the arabicized form of Farsi). In 1935, the king of Persia, Reza Shah, requested that the international community to call the country by its native name, and so the official name was changed from Persian to Iran. Because of this change, the words Persia and Persian became less popular. Academics usually prefer to use the word Persian because it better expresses the historic role of the language, but technically both terms are accepted and have the same meaning
For historical purposes, I will use the name Persian throughout this post. Persian is a part of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family of languages. The history of the language is broken into three periods: Old, Middle, and New.
The oldest records in Old Persian date back to the Persian Empire of the 6th Century BCE and the oldest dated example is the Behistun Inscription (for more information view Cultural Post #3). After Aramaic, Old Persian is the most commonly attested language of the Achaemenid age and is primarly attested in the inscriptions of Western Iran.
Middle Persian comes from the Sassanid era. Written Middle Persian reflected its oral use. It was during this period that the terms Parsig and Parsik were first used to refer to the language.
Finally, New Persian dates from the post-Sassanid era to present day. Persian was the official and cultural language of many Islamic dynasties and even today it is viewed as a literary and prestigious language among the educated elite of the Middle East. After the Arabic invasion of Persia, the Persians began to adopt many words and letters from Arabic, which expanded the Persian vocabulary and alphabet.
Today, Contemporary Persian contained many words from not only Arabic, but also Russian, French, and English. These words mostly contribute to the technical vocabulary of Persian. The Iranian National Academy of Persian Language and Literature exists to evaluate these new words in order to initiate and advise their Persian equivalents.
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