The Persian script

Persian is written from right to left in an alphabet of thirty-two letters. Twenty-eight come from Arabic, which Persian adopted after the Islamic conquest in place of the old Pahlavi script. Four were added for sounds that Arabic does not have: پ for p, چ for ch, ژ for zh, as in zhāleh ‘dew’, and گ for g. The new letters were made simply, by adding dots or a stroke to existing Arabic shapes. Most letters join to their neighbours, taking different forms at the start, middle and end of a word, and short vowels are usually left unwritten, so that a reader must know a word to pronounce it.

Persian also uses its own forms of two letters, writing k and y as ک and ی where Arabic has different shapes, and relies on a small, invisible character, the zero-width non-joiner, to keep parts of words apart without a space, as in می‌روم miravam ‘I go’. The same alphabet, with further letters, is used for Kurdish (Sorani), Balochi, Pashto, Urdu and the Azerbaijani of Iran.

Nastaliq

Persian is famous for nasta‘liq, the ‘hanging’ script, in which words slope from upper right down to the baseline and long, sweeping curves alternate with tight clusters of letters. It developed in Iran in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and tradition credits Mir Ali Tabrizi with codifying it. Mir Emad, working in Isfahan around 1600, is often regarded as its greatest master. Nastaliq became the script of Persian poetry, used for manuscripts of Hafez and Saadi and later for book titles, shop signs and wedding invitations. Its quicker relative, shekasteh, ‘broken’, is harder to read but beautiful in its own right.

Cyrillic in Tajikistan

In Tajikistan, Persian has been written in Cyrillic since 1940, after an interval in Latin letters from 1928. Tajik Cyrillic adds letters such as ғ, қ, ҳ, ҷ, ӣ and ӯ for Persian sounds, and writes every vowel in full, so that шер ‘lion’ and шир ‘milk’, written alike in the Perso-Arabic script, are told apart on the page. The classics of Rudaki, Ferdowsi and Hafez are printed in Tajikistan in Cyrillic, and the poetry is the same poetry whatever alphabet carries it.