Persian belongs to the Indo- European language family and is related to Germanic and Slavic languages, which means that Persian has major similarities with the European languages in grammar, syntax and word formation. There are only two consonantal sounds in Persian that differ from consonantal sounds that English speakers can easily pronounce: sound kh as in German Bach, and a soft glottal sound q similar to the first sound in French “rouge” but with a harder glottal quality. Persian language has no cases, no noun inflection, no gender categories, no irregular conjugation of verbs and no capital letters. Persian is, perhaps, the easiest language of the Middle East for speakers of Western languages to learn. Modern Persian of Iran is a language of Indo- European origin with a multitude of English, French, Turkish and Arabic cognates combined with the core Persian vocabulary and built upon a basic and uncomplicated grammar. Persian is spoken by over one hundred million people around the world, including one million people in the United States. Farsi of Iran, Tajiki of Tajikistan and Dari of Afghanistan are all variants that share roots in the same Persian language. Until 1964, the variant of Persian spoken in Afghanistan was called Farsi, and its native speakers in Afghanistan still widely refer to it as Farsi, even though officially it is now called Dari. The Tajiki variant of Persian is also spoken in various parts of Uzbekistan, most notably Bukhara, Samarkand and Surxondaryo areas. In the English language, Persian is a reference to the modern live language, while Farsi is indeed the name used by native speakers in Iran to refer to this language in their native tongue. Old Persian, Middle Persian and modern Persian refer to different stages in the development of the same language, the present-day Persian.

THE ALPHABET

The Persian alphabet contains thirty- two letters and a few special signs that can be used when needed as pronunciation and grammatical markers in order to avoid occasional ambiguity. The Persian sound system contains twenty- one consonant sounds, six vowels and two diphthongs.

Peculiarities of the Persian script:

• (1) Persian is written from right to left. Due to this fact, Persian books start on the right side of the cover, that is, diametrically opposite to the format of books printed in the Western scripts.

• (2) There are no capital letters in the Persian script.