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Nov 2, 2000, 7:43 am

#25

doc

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Join Date: May 1999

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FWIW,

"In recent years, there has been a growing tendency to refer to Persian as Farsi. Professor Ehsan Yarshater, editor of the Encyclopaedia Iranica, has written about the damage wrought by changing "Persia" to "Iran" and has pointed out that the use of Farsi in foreign languages is as detrimental.(1) Here, I would like to focus on the latter issue and explain the reasons behind the growth of tendencies to call Persian Farsi.

Persian, the term used for centuries in the West, originated in a region of southern Iran formerly known as Persis. It was the language of the Parsa, an Indo-European nomadic people who migrated into the region about 1000 BC. The older forms of the language are known as Old and Middle Persian. Old Persian was spoken until approximately the 3rd century BC and Middle Persian, or Pahlavi, was spoken from the 3rd century BC to the 9th century AD.

The use of the names Persia and Persian were gradually extended by the ancient Greeks and other Western peoples to apply to the Iranian Plateau and the official language in the region respectively. New Persian is closely related to these ancient forms. Persian became the lingua franca of the region during the Islamic period. It was the official language of countries such as India for many centuries during which time numerous annals, chronicles, and court volumes of poetry were compiled outside Iran. (2)

Today, Persian is not only the name of the official language in Iran but also of the Republic of Tajikistan, and Afghanistan, and different dialects of this language are spoken in many regions of south and central Asia.(3)"
http://www.iranian.com/Features/Dec97/Persian/

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