Talk:Persian alphabet

Diacritics

Although not used for writing Farsi by Iranians themselves, some westerners inserted "vowel-points" showing short vowels into extracts of Farsi works in order to write primers for western learners of Farsi.

A primer of Persian: containing selections for reading and composition with the elements of syntax By George Speirs Alexander Ranking

http://books.google.com/books?id=Fz9bAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

more information on the diacritics

http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/Romanization/Romanization_Persian.pdf

http://www.eki.ee/wgrs/rom1_fa.htm

http://www.eki.ee/wgrs/v2_2/rom1_fa.htm

http://www.transparent.com/learn-farsi/overview.html#.UWtoe8u9KSM

http://books.google.com/books?id=zLlFAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA7#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=NEMOAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA4#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=DD5bAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA5#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=M0MOAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA5#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=bFcOAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA7#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=qP9GAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA5#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=knA9NptP7xsC&pg=PP13#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=9flPAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA11#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=kP9GAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA10#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=a7dIAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA294#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=g5ZHAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA6#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=O3lHAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA8#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=uL1TAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA9#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=9ONGAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA3#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=-L9UAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA14#v=onepage&q&f=false

Rajmaan (talk) 03:01, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

What does this mean?

"However two of them are different. " Two of what? Is the sentence trying to say, "the two are [a little] different?"211.225.33.104 (talk) 07:38, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

Writing numbers right to left

In Perso-Arabic, as in Arabic, words are written from right to left while numbers are written from left to right.

The Western convention is to write numbers left to right, most-significant digit to least significant digit. In Persian script, are numbers actually written left-to-write (as performed with an actual pen) or are the numbers written right to left LSD to MDS, which would appear to a Western eye as matching our left to right convention? If Persian writers actually change pen direction, do they wind up with the infamous plan ahea
d problem? — MaxEnt 03:06, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

I've seen commenters elsewhere (sorry, don't have link) say that, in Arabic, 321 would be read "one and twenty and three hundred". That is, they both write and say the LSDs first. Whether this extends to other languages that use Arabic script is a good question. Pelagic (talk) 21:32, 8 July 2015 (UTC)

Perso-Arabic

Making a blanket change from "Perso-Arabic" to "Arabic" does not make sense. This article is about the Persian alphabet, not the Arabic script nor Arabic alphabet which already have separate articles.

I take the use of "Perso-Arabic script" in this article to mean that the term is restrictive (referring to the Persian variant of Arabic script) rather than inclusive (referring to Persian and Arabic together). Is that correct?

The 25 March edit by 194.36.164.228 led to some nonsensical statements, like "there are many Arabic-derived alphabets which were not influenced by the Arabic script".

If an editor thinks that there are statements here that apply to all Arabic scripts, then he should move them to the Arabic script article, not just leave them here and change "Persian" to "Arabic".

If editors feel that the term "Perso-Arabic script" is confusing, overused, or incorrectly used, then perhaps we should carefully employ some alternate terms, such as "Persian variant of Arabic script", "Persian extension", or "Persian alphabet". (Strictly, it's an abjad rather than an alphabet, but there seems to be a fairly consistent use of Xxx alphabet, Xxx script, and Xxx language in article titles.)

Pelagic (talk) 02:18, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

Panjistani?

Some writers are saying that there are three dialects or dialect groups within the Lahnda group:

• Saraiki (southern)
• Hindko (western)
• Panjistani (northern)

http://panjistani.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Panjistani_langauge, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Ma120/sandbox&oldid=619888358

Do we gain anything by listing all these here, or by replacing a bluelink to Saraiki with a redlink to Panjistani?

The current Hindko article lists Panjistani as a synonym, but doesn't say much about the writing system other than it uses Shahmukhi. The Saraiki articles (Saraiki language, Saraiki alphabet) mention that there are 5 extra characters (44 total) compared to the 39 in standard Urdu, so at least that is notable.

But then the Shahmukhi article has a table with 47 characters and an infobox with 38 letters.

Like most readers, I'm not an Indologist and can't read Arabic script, so I find all this very confusing.

It seems that any time we have a statement of the form "script X is used to write languages A, B, and C, amongst others" it invites edits from people who are pushing a nationalist agenda or simply want to say "my dialect is better than your dialect".

Is there some way that we can structure this article to (a) avoid disruptive edits, and (b) give a clean overview of the different extensions to (Perso-)Arabic script without requiring the reader to click/tap through to many different pages?

I'd like to make a table, but don't feel qualified. Perhaps even a separate article like "Comparison of alphabets using Arabic script" to save cluttering the main article with a large table? (And the table will grow as people add the character repertoires of their favourite languages/dialects.)

P.S. sorry for using external-link markup for the permalinks; I can't remember the proper wikilink syntax.

Pelagic (talk) 22:33, 8 July 2015 (UTC)

Arabic script

@Largoplazo: I understand the point you are trying to make in this edit but honestly this section is literally just "the Arabic script 101", it doesn't talk about the Persian adaptations at all. I was considering trying to reframe it today because, for example, the vowel length of Middle Persian and early New Persian has collapsed (in three distinct manners: Western, Dari and Tajiki!) into a five or seven vowel system, but the spelling remains archaic. Also, Persian remains an abjad; it's not like Yiddish's adaptation of the Aramaic Square Script at all.

I think the solution is to section it, talk about Arabic (I cleaned that section up a bit but it could be slimmed down more), then talk about how Middle Persian borrowed it and what it means in Western Persian today (vowels, sound collapse). Ogress 22:05, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

I see your point as well. But why should the article spend any time talking about what happened in Arabic, rather than just taking it for granted (because it's explained at Arabic script, to which this article links) and explaining "like the Arabic script, the Persian script doesn't ordinarily represent most vowels ..." or whatever it would be accurate to say about Persian vowels (about which I am no expert, hence no specifics from me).

I know that the Persian script remains an abjad, but my point was that when a language derives its script from another language's script, it isn't a given that it uses it the same way. I didn't see any reason to mention the nature of the script as Arabic uses it when this is an article on Persian script. After all, the articles on English alphabet and, for example, Maltese alphabet may describe specific adaptations that the respective languages made to the Latin alphabet, but they don't talk at length about the nature of the alphabet as used by the ancient Romans. —Largo Plazo (talk) 15:43, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

The history of the adaptation of the Arabic script to Persian is fairly straightforward but most of what is discussed is specific to the needs of Arabic and makes no sense when discussing Persian. We could dispense with discussion of Arabic but we'd need to more than just change one word from "Arabic" to "Persian" because the statements are unequivocally specific to Arabic and relate to how it was adopted by Middle Persian. The changes from Middle Persian to New Persian are a second bit that need to be added on. I'll have a quick run at it and post a suggested rewording [1]. Ogress 17:20, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Dastur-e khatt-e Farsi

[2] is a PDF with a part of دستور خطّ فارسى by Academy of Persian Language and Literature. The article links to it twice: as a reference for the table of letters, and under external links. But its full text is also available in textual form at Academy's site and this is the relevant chapter. Perhaps it would be better than image-only PDF? — mwgamera (talk) 05:55, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

wrong letter?

i think the box has a wrong letter? doesn't Persian use the Asian ک instead of Arabic ك usually? Irtapil (talk) 05:33, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

it seems to be generated by the template. {{Arabic-script sidebar|Persian}} Irtapil (talk) 05:36, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

others... it seems to use Asian Key in other languages... i'm not sure if Arabic Kaf maybe is used in Persian?

"Add an unnamed first parameter Pashto, Persian, Urdu, Burushaski, Saraiki, Punjabi, Sindhi or Uyghur (case-insensitive) to display that alphabet instead..." [3]

• @Irtapil: "the box has a wrong letter?" which box you are talking about?! I checked whole the artcle and couldn't find such thing.--Editor-1 (talk) 06:47, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

@Editor-1: in the side bar, top right of article, same box as middle of top row above here on the talk page. bizarrely on my phone now it displays as an Urdu style kaf ک with no extra squiggle but on my PC a couple of hours ago it looked like the Arabic  ك kaf so, either someone edited the template in the past few hours, or it uses a font on my pc that makes Urdu kaf look like Arabic kaf. Irtapil (talk) 08:15, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

@Editor-1:

weird... urdu and Persian boxes use the same character and call the same fonts but they looked different on my pc...  and nobody had edited the template since February

|persian = {{Lang|1=fa|2=<span style="font-size: 125%; line-height: 170%;"> {{Nastaliq| [[ا]] [[ب]] [[پ]] [[ت]] [[ث]] [[ج]] [[چ]] [[ح]] [[خ]] [[د]] [[ذ]] [[ر]] [[ز]] [[ژ]] [[س]] [[ش]] [[ص]] [[ض]] [[ط]] [[ظ]] [[ع]] [[غ]] [[ف]] [[ق]] [[ک]] [[گ]] [[ل]] [[م]] [[ن]] [[و]] [[ه]] [[ی]] |fa}}   </span>}}
 |urdu = {{Lang|1=ur|2=<span style="font-size: 125%; line-height: 170%;"> {{Nastaliq| [[ا]] [[ب]] [[پ]] [[ت]] [[ٹ]] [[ث]] [[ج]] [[چ]] [[ح]] [[خ]] [[د]] [[ڈ]] [[ذ]] [[ر]] [[ڑ]] [[ز]] [[ژ]] [[س]] [[ش]] [[ص]] [[ض]] [[ط]] [[ظ]] [[ع]] [[غ]] [[ف]] [[ق]] [[ک]] [[گ]] [[ل]] [[م]] [[ن]] ([[ں]]) [[و]] [[ہ]] ([[ھ]]) [[ء]] [[ی]] [[ے]] }}   </span>}}

|persian =   ا ب پ ت ث ج چ ح خ د ذ ر ز ژ س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ک گ ل م ن و ه ی    
|urdu =   ا ب پ ت ٹ ث ج چ ح خ د ڈ ذ ر ڑ ز ژ س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ک گ ل م ن (ں) و ہ (ھ) ء ی ے    

would the Lang tags change which font it uses? might one be showing in Urdi typesetting and the other in noto nastaliq? Irtapil (talk) 08:26, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

Persian has an extra |fa at the end? let's see what moving that to the اردو box does...

noto nastaliq urdu = عربي ك كك ؛ اردو ک کک ؛ فارسی ک کک ؛ سنڌي ک کک ڪ ڪڪ

urdu typesetting = عربي ك كك ؛ اردو ک کک ؛ فارسی ک کک ؛ سنڌي ک کک ڪ ڪڪ

Urdu عربي ك كك ؛ اردو ک کک ؛ فارسی ک کک ؛ سنڌي ک کک ڪ ڪڪ

Persian عربي ك كك ؛ اردو ک کک ؛ فارسی ک کک ؛ سنڌي ک کک ڪ ڪڪ

Urdu عربي ك كك ؛ اردو ک کک ؛ فارسی ک کک ؛ سنڌي ک کک ڪ ڪڪ

Persian عربي ك كك ؛ اردو ک کک ؛ فارسی ک کک ؛ سنڌي ک کک ڪ ڪڪ

Irtapil (talk) 15:29, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

the lang tags and nastaliq tags do conspire to serve fonts in a different order [4]

noto nastaliq removes the squiggle from arabic K (blue) but i cannot work out why the two farsi lang tags add the squiggle to Asian K (yellow).

Irtapil (talk) 16:16, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

|persian = عربي ك ككك Arabic ك ک گ ككك ککک گگگ فارسی ک ککک Farsi  

‮عربي ك كك ؛ فارسی واردو ک کک

عربي ك كك ؛ فارسی واردو ک کک

عربي ك كك ؛ فارسی واردو ک کک

As I understand it, in most languages (including Persian) ك and ک are allographs. The choice of which code point to use is a matter of convention, and the convention for Persian is to use ک, and it's correctly adhered to here; so nothing to change in template. But the Noto Nastaliq Urdu font that ends up being used for me displays both indistinguishably, varying the actual glyph, as you correctly guessed, with language tagged, and for Arabic and Persian it includes that hamza-like squiggle. I don't know whether this makes Noto Nastaliq Urdu a wrong font to use for Persian or not, but it seems intentional.—MwGamera (talk) 16:32, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

noto nastaliq isn't the one making the Farsi unicode character look like the Arabic one, Noto is doing the opposite. noto is making them all look Farsi/Urdu style, which makes sense given it's an Eastern style font. But i don't know which font or what else is making them all look Arabic style? nothing installed on my system does that. At first i thought it was the wrong unicode character in the list, a simple mixup and worth changing, but now it's just kind of bugging me that i can't explain what's going on.

and yeah i know ـیـ ـی and ک seem to be fairly interchangeable with ك and ـي what regional features get changed with different unicode characters vs different fonts seems a bit haphazard? e.g. Urdu and Arabic get overlapping character sets, while scripts that traditionally look way more similar get completely different sets.

Irtapil (talk) 09:41, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

But it is the font that is doing it! Noto Nastaliq Urdu is sensitive to language and contains substitution tables catering to Arabic, Persian, Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Urdu. It renders ک differently when tagged as Arabic or Persian than when tagged Urdu, Kashmiri, Sindhi, or something else (default is the same as in Urdu). On the Web lang HTML attribute with IETF language tag ({{lang|}} template on Wikipedia) beside possibly guiding browser in selection of right font is also passed along to the font rendering engine where it might influence glyph substitutions (in sufficiently modern browser one can also use font-language-override CSS property with OpenType language tag instead). It's up to a font to make use of this information and Noto Nastaliq Urdu does what you see.

Unicode is a huge pile of compromises between conflicting goals. Works as intended ;)—MwGamera (talk) 02:20, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Proposed Latin alphabet

I am removing the section about the "proposed Latin alphabet". It was originally added with a single reference to the primary source by the author of the proposal (Hayat, Anwar (2019). "The Impact of Arabic Orthography on Literacy and Economic Development in Afghanistan". International Journal of Education, Culture and Society. 4: 1. doi:10.11648/j.ijecs.20190401.11{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)) published in what Wikipedia regards as a predatory open access journal. The reference was later removed because of this. There are no other references and there is no evidence of it being used anywhere or even seriously considered by anyone. The description wasn't even complete as the table was missing some of the proposed letters that couldn't be realized with Unicode. Perhaps there are some ad-hoc romanization systems that might deserve some mention, but this section is not about them. Although some editors probably thought it is as evidenced by some edits to the table that made it inconsistent with the text preceding it. As it stands now it just describes some random person's Latin-based conscript for Persian which is neither relevant to the article nor notable at all. Not a WP:SOAPBOX. I don't think it could even be used as a starting point for anything useful. It doesn't make any sense to keep it around so I am removing it.

While I'm at it, I would like to mention that I can't see what is the purpose of the subheadings Persian alphabet § Variants (a big image with isolated forms from different fonts; it doesn't work as a showcase of differences between different styles if that was the intent) and Persian alphabet § Letter construction (an extremely inefficient way of showing relations between letters in a form of mostly blank table which isn't specific to Persian and that looks like a camouflaged advertisement of Compart AG), but I am not touching them now. – MwGamera (talk) 17:10, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

@MwGamera: Yes, this removal was overdue per WP:UNDUE. As for the massive tables, they were added here[5]. Similar things happened in Urdu alphabet, and some editors (including me) were not very happy about it. –Austronesier (talk) 20:36, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

Persian Alphabet ligature of H & A missing

Although not as common as the l & a ligature, the ligature of h & a is very common in persian stylistic writing scripts, quite similar to U+0664 ٤ ‎

An example of this can be seen here: https://nastaliqonline.ir/NastaliqOnline.ir.aspx?16918.3871671

It ought to be added to the section about ligatures

83.59.2.106 (talk) 00:13, 9 April 2022 (UTC)

The Cyrillic Script in Tajik-Persian is not de facto anymore.

The Cyrillic Script in Tajik-Persian is not de facto anymore and was not ever since 2004... They even updated certain orthographic rules by law. 62.89.209.185 (talk) 22:49, 14 July 2023 (UTC)