How similar is modern Persian to 4,000-year-old Persian?

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How similar is modern Persian to 4,000-year-old Persian?

Postby Khayyam » Thu Nov 10, 2022 3:00 am

Once I've mastered modern Persian to the point where I can understand pretty much any modern Persian I read or hear, how much more work will I have to do to understand 4,000-year-old Persian? How much has the language changed since then?

It seems there are only a few people on this forum who are into Persian at all, so asking about ancient Persian may be unreasonable. If no one knows, I'm fine with doing my own research; I just thought I'd throw it out there in case anyone (read: the two of you--lol) knows off the top of their heads.
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Re: How similar is modern Persian to 4,000-year-old Persian?

Postby Deinonysus » Fri Nov 11, 2022 2:33 am

If you want to read 4,000-year-old Persian I'm afraid you're out of luck. I believe the earliest attested writing in Persian is only around 2500 years old. If you want to read something that's 4,000 years old, your main options would be Egyptian or Akkadian. Sumerian was on its way out by then after a brief thousand-year run.

I know very little about Persian so I can't say how much you'd be able to understand. Of course there would be a massive vocabulary load because so much of the original Indo-European vocabulary was replaced with Arabic on the modern language. I've heard Modern Persian has a reputation for having simple grammar but Old Persian seems to have a ton of cases. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Persian#Grammar

I would be interested to see if you can make out any of this passage from the Behistun inscription by Darius I. Persian cuneiform is acually very simple compared to a most other writing sytems at the time. There are only around 50 symbols. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Persi ... form#Signs

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Re: How similar is modern Persian to 4,000-year-old Persian?

Postby Odair » Fri Nov 11, 2022 10:49 am

I can't even read modern Persian from a few centuries ago....

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Re: How similar is modern Persian to 4,000-year-old Persian?

Postby Deinonysus » Sat Nov 12, 2022 7:58 pm

I just saw a thread on Reddit about whether other languages have changed as much as Old English -> Modern English, and the top comment mentioned Persian as being a similar case to English:

u/ksdkjlf wrote:Since u/ns930 linked to a McWhorter piece, I'll mention one notable language that is like English in this regard is Persian, for comparable reasons. Of Persian, McWhorter says: "But Persian is the same story in that Old Persian was much, much more complex. But Persian was a language of empire. And in order to build especially various monuments and various municipalities within Persia, Persia imported people from a great many other places. And one thing about those people from other places is that because they were from the other places, they did not speak Persian. And as a result, they came up with a simpler kind of Persian and passed that down the generations in a society that largely did not have literacy. And next thing you knew, you had a streamlined kind of Persian such as you have today. So both Old English and Old Persian went through the same process, and the result was the disarmingly approachable, for a foreigner, versions of the languages that you have today"

https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comm ... &context=3
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Re: How similar is modern Persian to 4,000-year-old Persian?

Postby Khayyam » Sun Nov 13, 2022 2:04 am

Ha--I can't read that cuneiform at all. I doubt that most native Persian speakers would have any idea that it's a form of Persian.

Regarding the simplicity of modern Persian: yeah, I was shocked at how easy Persian was once I'd gotten over the hump of learning the alphabet. It really feels like I'm being thrown one softball pitch after another. If anyone ever sees me reading Persian script and is impressed, I'll feel like I'm pulling the wool over their eyes if I don't tell them not to be deceived by the exotic letters.

I'm becoming very curious about what richness might've been lost when Persian had to change so as to be easily learned by foreigners.
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Re: How similar is modern Persian to 4,000-year-old Persian?

Postby Fortheo » Wed Nov 16, 2022 8:59 pm

Khayyam wrote:Ha--I can't read that cuneiform at all. I doubt that most native Persian speakers would have any idea that it's a form of Persian.

Regarding the simplicity of modern Persian: yeah, I was shocked at how easy Persian was once I'd gotten over the hump of learning the alphabet. It really feels like I'm being thrown one softball pitch after another. If anyone ever sees me reading Persian script and is impressed, I'll feel like I'm pulling the wool over their eyes if I don't tell them not to be deceived by the exotic letters.

I'm becoming very curious about what richness might've been lost when Persian had to change so as to be easily learned by foreigners.


There's a thread somewhere on here about what triggers wanderlust, and for me, a comment like this is one of my triggers :lol: . what do you find so easy about the language?
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Re: How similar is modern Persian to 4,000-year-old Persian?

Postby Khayyam » Thu Nov 17, 2022 12:19 am

Fortheo wrote:
Khayyam wrote:Ha--I can't read that cuneiform at all. I doubt that most native Persian speakers would have any idea that it's a form of Persian.

Regarding the simplicity of modern Persian: yeah, I was shocked at how easy Persian was once I'd gotten over the hump of learning the alphabet. It really feels like I'm being thrown one softball pitch after another. If anyone ever sees me reading Persian script and is impressed, I'll feel like I'm pulling the wool over their eyes if I don't tell them not to be deceived by the exotic letters.

I'm becoming very curious about what richness might've been lost when Persian had to change so as to be easily learned by foreigners.


There's a thread somewhere on here about what triggers wanderlust, and for me, a comment like this is one of my triggers :lol: . what do you find so easy about the language?


They use suffixes (I think that term applies here--I don't know, I'm no language scholar) at the ends of nouns to tell you whether they're direct object, indirect object, etc. If you want to know at a glance where the direct object is, all you do is look for the "ra". (That also tells you it's a noun, obviously.) They make almost constant use of a handful of words that essentially mean doing/engaging in, and whenever you encounter one, you know that the word that preceded it + that one = a verb. ("swimming doing," etc.) Pronunciation is almost perfectly consistent with spelling. (Exceptions for some loan words.) No cases. And not only are there no gendered nouns, there's no gendered *anything* as far as I've seen so far. There's only one pronoun, "oo", which can mean he, she, or it. Instead of using possessive pronouns, they apply suffixes to the nouns being possessed that mean "his or hers."

It's interesting to me to think of Persia's status as a hub of world culture for all those centuries, and how so many diverse people passing through and struggling to understand each other would have been a strong selection pressure in favor of simplicity.

Odair or anyone else who really knows Persian, please correct me if I've erred at any point here.
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