Talk:Persian grammar

message: I'd like to see some examples of transitive and intransitive verbs in future, present, and past tenses - For transitive verbs, I hear that in the future and present, objects are marked with the accusative, yet in the past the marker goes on the subject...? If this is indeed true I think a section on 'split ergativity' would be great!
examples:
John will sleep/ John will see the man
John sleeps/ John sees the man
John slept/ John saw the man  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.104.195.115 (talk) 05:41, 10 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Persian isn't ergative. Perhaps you are thinking of Hindi/Urdu, which is partly ergative. Kanjuzi (talk) 05:36, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Object,  Subject Marking/ Ergativity

message: Actually, I think it should become more of an article series, with summaries here - just as it is with other languages on Wikipedia - but maybe we should discuss having just one big article for now (see below).
:Other languages (say, German) probably need a separate article on adjectives, since declension can be an issue.  As long as there's only a couple paragraphs talking about a given item, I see little need to separate it into a separate article.  Of course there's alot to say about nouns and verbs, so that's understandable to spin these off into separate articles.  But if we keep it a single article while we're resolving, eg. transliteration issues etc., the more consistency we'll have when we do spin them off.  --jonsafari 19:35, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure why the Bukhara article would be seen as any sort of reference.  While I have a Langenscheidt Persian-German German-Persian dictionary (aimed at regular German speakers) that uses <x>, <š>, and <č> in their transliteration, I'm ok with changing these three to <kh>, <sh>, and <ch>. --jonsafari 19:35, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

text: In the inline text we could have a format like dær (در) 'door', and possibly for floats too.  --jonsafari 19:35, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

text: It seems more applicable to Persian phonology and the 2 persian alphabet articles, but if you'd like to spearhead that effort for this article, by all means.  --jonsafari 19:35, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

text: I wrote a majority of this article one saturday afternoon, as you can see by viewing the first post of this article (id 11074942).  The verb tables are in the format that they are because I just wanted to get the content up on the internet.  I agree that the format of the verb tables is ugly, so if you'd like to change that, be my guest. --jonsafari 19:35, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: (More of) my suggestions for expanding & improving the article - please comment

message: I looked at the Bukhara article, and it transliterates the Persian as Bukhârâ.  Maybe we could use marked vowels instead of the ligature, but dispense with the x and s-with-caron for the consonants and just use the expected English digraphs instead?  My concern is that a non-specialist consulting this article will be put off by the transliteration system.  People should be aware of the system, however - I have seen it used in Ann Lambton's grammar and in some other works on Persian, and your comments seem to suggest it is the de facto standard in Persian studies.  Why don't we create an article on transliteration of Persian, or discuss it at the Persian alphabet article and link to the appropriate section from here?
:I'm not sure why the Bukhara article would be seen as any sort of reference.  While I have a Langenscheidt Persian-German German-Persian dictionary (aimed at regular German speakers) that uses <x>, <š>, and <č> in their transliteration, I'm ok with changing these three to <kh>, <sh>, and <ch>. --jonsafari 19:35, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Transliteration

message: I think Greek grammar does a pretty good job of describing the grammar of modern Greek, without resorting to separate articles for nouns, verbs, etc. - although most other language articles seem to do this.  Everything is covered, examples are given, and the tables are neat and attractive.  My only complaint is that the overall article is overly-long, in my opinon.  Another problem is that the contributors assume one knows the Greek alphabet and the phonetic values in Modern Greek.  I happen to be able to read Greek, but not every reader will; I think if we imitate their layout (where appropriate) we might want to have both the original Perso-Arabic and an easily readable transliteration.
:In the inline text we could have a format like dær (در) 'door', and possibly for floats too.  --jonsafari 19:35, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It seems more applicable to Persian phonology and the 2 persian alphabet articles, but if you'd like to spearhead that effort for this article, by all means.  --jonsafari 19:35, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

text: I wrote a majority of this article one saturday afternoon, as you can see by viewing the first post of this article (id 11074942).  The verb tables are in the format that they are because I just wanted to get the content up on the internet.  I agree that the format of the verb tables is ugly, so if you'd like to change that, be my guest. --jonsafari 19:35, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Content & Layout - Greek style? 

message: Looking at the Tajik grammar, it seems to be a rehashing of what's presented in this article, except the Cyrillic alphabet is used instead of the Perso-Arabic.  It seems to me redundant, and instead of duplicating content, we should have the article focus on any major differences in the grammar of Tajik compared to the other dialects.  In fact, it may not even pay to have a separeate "Tajik grammar" article: We could just discuss any grammatical differences in the "Tajik language" article, as they do for Cypriot Greek.  What does everyone else think?  --Jpbrenna 01:09, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm ok with either way.  It seems to be right on the border between merging the two articles or meriting separate articles.  It might be cumbersome to support the differences between Iranian Persian, Dari, and Tajik in one article, but then again there's alot of reduplication of effort.  On the other hand, much of the necessary text is already in place for both articles, so why bother?  Maybe a compromise could be to just coordinate efforts more, and have us keep an eye on both articles.  There does seem to be some important Turkic influences on Tajik grammar.  But like I said before, I'm fine with either way as long as things are executed non-sloppily.  –jonsafari 20:42, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This situation is similar to that of Hindi-Urdu grammar. The decision there was to have one article with both scripts: Devanagari and Perseo-Arabic. If Tajik and Persian are mutually intelligible (as Hindi and Urdu are), it might be a good idea to merge the two. Thanks, AnupamTalk 05:57, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tajik 

message: I added more tenses and presented them in 3rd person singular instead of 1st person (it's better especially for passive voice). We have more tenses in Persian and I could add them but since we have to resort to technical names, I decided to first talk about it and then decide what to do. I know here is not a forum but I didn't like to edit further without having had discussed about it. If I want to summarize Persian tenses of indicative mood (š = sh):
preterite: raft
l— imperfective: miraft
l— progressive: dâšt miraft
l— perfective: rafteast (#1)
l—— imperfective: mirafteast (#2)
l—— progressive: dâšte[ast] mirafteast (#3)
pluperfect: rafte bud
l— imperfective: mirafte bud
l— progressive: dâšt mirafte bud
l— perfective: rafte budeast
l—— imperfective: mirafte budeast (#4)
l—— progressive: dâšteast mirafte budeast (#5)
(#1) the enclitic -ast has been reduced to -e in spoken Iranian Persian and we say: rafte (stress is on the last syllable). Please note that -ast is not a word to be written apart. Although we normally do so in Perso-Arabic and separated with a "space" but it should be separated by a zero-width non-joiner character. Its HTML entity code is #8204.
(#2) for the same reason, we say mirafte
(#3) for the same reason, we say dâšte mirafte
(#4) for the same reason, we say mirafte bude
(#5) for the same reason, we say dâšte mirafte bude
Progressive tenses presented here, belong to spoken Iranian Persian. In Tajiki Persian, they have a different way for expressing the progressive aspect.
The tenses that I want to add are:
* dâšte[ast] mirafteast (progressive perfective preterite i.e. progressive aspect of perfective aspect of the preterite tense)
* dâšt mirafte bud (progressive pluperfect)
* rafte budeast (perfective pluperfect i.e. perfective aspect of pluperfect)
* mirafte budeast (imperfective perfective pluperfect)
* dâšteast mirafte budeast (progressive perfective pluperfect)
Additionally, under this naming, rafteast is called "perfective preterite" because as I have shown above, it's perfective aspect of preterite. This name conforms with other names (e.g. progressive aspect of perfective preterite: dâšte[ast] mirafteast)
My opinion: Persian has these tenses and we should include them in Wiki page even if we have to resort to using technical names. Perhaps, we can present them as the chart I have used above.
--Alijsh 04:53, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The reason I originally put the first person singular, instead of the third person singular, is that it clearly shows where the person and number agreement should appear on a verb or verbal complex.  The third person singular form does not show this in many forms.  This is very beneficial to those not familiar with Persian.  Your other contributions are welcome additions.  –jonsafari 01:20, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Some of these tenses are completely marginal or simply incorrect in Persian, for example mirafte bud and dâšteast mirafte budeast - the last one particularly is a nonsense. The grammarian Roohollah Mofidi in this article ["Budan va dāštan: do fe'l-e istā-ye fārsi", p.77, labels mirafte bud as ungrammatical. These tenses do not need to be included in an elementary article of this kind therefore. Kanjuzi (talk) 08:47, 31 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tenses 

message: I am a university-trained language teacher. My degree included lingiistics. Yet I understand many parts of this article only very vaguely. I think Wikipedia articles should be comprehensible to any moderately well-educated reader. This one isn't. I suspect the only peope who will really understand it are those who know all about it anyway. APW (talk) 18:40, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: What specifically was too difficult for you?  Is there another language grammar article that is not as difficult, that might serve as an example?  –jonsafari (talk) 02:25, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  The article is too difficult 

message: Can anyone add a section to the article where influence from Arabian is discussed? A lot of people think (probably reasonably) that all modern languages that belong to the Indo-Aryan group have diverged tremendously from the Indo-European structure. It would be very useful if there were some info on what new constructs appeared in modern Persian and how they supplanted the original Indo-European ones due to influence by different languages, mainly by Arabic. --78.60.136.180 (talk) 13:01, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Influence by Arabic 

message: I don't claim any knowledge of Persian or of the linguistic literature on it, but I make the following observations, which seem to me self-evident to any linguist:
* the claim that "the Persian language had become more analytical, having no grammatical gender and few case markings, and New Persian has inherited such characteristics. The agglutinative structure of the language is its most notable feature among other Iranian languages." contains a fundamental contradition - how can NP inherit an analytical morphology and yet be classified as agglutinative?
* the examples of verb constructions further down the page demonstrate conclusively that the verb forms are not agglutinative. 
Can someone give reasons why the claim for agglutination should not simply be deleted as mistaken? --Pfold (talk) 07:36, 20 November 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Since no-one has come forward to defend this claim, I'm going to remove the material in question --Pfold (talk) 16:15, 17 January 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Agglutination 

message: The bibliography, as it was, was not satisfactory. I have put it in alphabetical order of author. Among other faults it put misleading dates such as '2011' (the latest reprinting perhaps) on 19th-century books, giving the impression that they were recent, while at the same time omitting readily available more up-to-date modern works, such as those by Mace, Rafiee, and Yousef. It may be that some of the older works are merely of historical interest and are not necessary. The Phillott book, despite being published in 1919, however, is still a good one. Kanjuzi (talk) 08:47, 31 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Bibliography

message: Thanks to the person who fixed my typo. I wish more readers were so alert! Kanjuzi (talk) 05:38, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Typo 

message: An anonymous editor has added Russian transliterations to a large part of the article. It all seems perfectly pointless. I suggest that these transliterations be removed. Kanjuzi (talk) 08:07, 13 August 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Same thing happened on Persian language (diff1) and Persian phonology (diff2). It seems those are Tajik transliterations in Cyrillic (Tajik alphabet). Look unnecessary. --Wario-Man (talk) 09:04, 13 August 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Russian additions