Orthography of Persian                                                                                      نوشتار فارسی

1. Persian is written from right to left.
2. Letters are written on a baseline and most of the time when they are on the baseline, they are connected very much like the cursive writing in English. The differences are the following
3. Whether we are typing or writing, Persian is always connected. As a result, the letters which are on the line have different shapes in accordance with their position, namely initial, middle, end and alone.
4. There is no capital vs. lower case letter in Persian.
5. The letters that naturally go under the baseline are not connected from the left. (Table 1)
6. There are 32 letters in use in Persian words. The letters are roughly associated with the sounds (vowels and consonants). However, like English, this correspondence is not one to one.
7. There are multiple letters associated with one sound, for example [z] sound comes in 4 shapes of (ز، ض، ظ، ذ). It is noteworthy that not all of these sounds are as frequent and productive of new words because the rest are associated with borrowed words from Arabic. We will treat these letters as redundant letters. (Table 2)
8. Weak consonants and semi vowels have the same shape as their vowel counterpart. So it looks as of several sounds corresponding to one letter shape. (Table 3)
9. Many letters are distinguished by using dots. Note that in English there only one letter with dot (i) and the dot is needed to distinguish it from (l). In Persian there are clusters of letters with the same shape whose only differences are in the number and the location of dots (above or below). While this make learning the writing easier, it makes the recognition of the letters a challege for the beginners.

Vowels (short and long)                                                                             واکه‌های بلند و کوتاه

Persian has three short vowels /a/, /e/, /o/, three long vowels /ā/, /ī/, /ū/, and two diphthongs /ow/ and /ey/ (Table 4).

Short vowels (sounds)

Pronounciation of short vowels are shorter in duration (miliseconds) than the long vowels.

Short vowels (writing) :

In the middle position, short vowels go above or below the letter that recieves the sound just like diacritical marks (é, ê) in Spanish or French Language. Note that /a/ (ــَـ) and /o/ (ــُـ) go above and /e/ (ــِـ) goes below the letter associated with the sound before them. For example, /be/ is written as ((بِـــــ and /ba/ is written as ((بَــــ and /bo/ is written as ((بُــــــ

At the beginning, short vowels borrow an alef to sit on as in asb اَسب.

At the end, short vowel /e/ (ـــِــ) and only in one exceptional case /a/ (ـــَــ) borrows another symbol. This time it is weakened /he/ which is written as (ه/ ـه). For example /e/ at the end of the word se = three ســه

Note, however, that it is not common to use the initial and middle mark in natural writing in Persian and native speakers would have to guess which one it is in the context. The only time, they will keep the short vowel sign is at the end which is distinctive and the word is not complete without the short vowel, like *سِــــ which is incorrect and incomplete.

Long vowels in Persian are written on the same baseline as consonants.

As vowels /ī/ and /ū/ share a similar letter with their semi-vowel/consonant counter parts /v/ and /y/, in order to distinguish them in the initial position, an alef is added to the beginning of /ū/ and /ī/.

Note the difference between the meaning of dūr = far away, as opposed to dowr = turn, on the one hand and key = when , kī = who, on the other. The difference points to the distinctive role of diphthongs in Persian.

How to type in Farsi

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