Classical Persian

Classical Persian (پارسی pārsī or فارسی کلاسیک fārsī-ye kelāsik) is the literary form of New Persian that flourished from the 9th to the 15th century CE, originating at the Samanid court (819–999) in Bukhara as a deliberate revival of pre-Islamic Persian identity in the Perso-Arabic script. The language of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh (c. 1010), Rumi's Masnavi (~1273), Saadi's Gulistan and Bustan (1258–1259), Hafez's Divan (~1370), Khayyam's Rubaiyat, and Nizami's Khamsa — together comprising one of the great literary corpora of world civilization. Distinguished from Modern Persian (fa) by preserved labialized /xʷ/ ("khw" in xʷāhar "sister", xʷurdan "eat"; lost in Modern Western Persian, retained in Dari/Tajiki), preserved long /ē oː/ vs /iː uː/ contrast (lost in Tehrani Persian; retained in Dari/Tajiki), preserved /ɣ/–/q/ distinction (merged in Modern Western Persian), and short /i u/ in syllables that later lowered to /e o/ in Tehrani (pidar→pedar, dil→del, gurba→gorbe, čišm→čašm). The pedagogical canon of literary education throughout Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and historically Mughal India — read continuously from the 11th century to the present, with relatively stable syntax and core vocabulary across that span.

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