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Persian: Modern Persian
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Modern Persian is a spoken language of more than 100 million people around the world. It is an official language of Iran (as Farsi), Tajikistan (as Tajik) and ... in Afghanistan (as Dari). Persian is also spoken in Uzbekistan, southwestern Pakistan, northern Iraq and southwestern Turkey, as well as by numerous speakers in living the countries of Europe and the USA. There are more than 1 million Persian speakers in the United States.
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The Persian language has six vowels and twenty-three consonants, including two affricates (ch) and (j).Historically, Persian distinguished length: the long vowels , , contrasting with the short vowels , , respectively. Modern spoken Persian... generally does not make this distinction anymore.
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In 1853, Britain and the Arab sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf signed the Perpetual Maritime Truce, formalizing the temporary truces of 1820 and 1835. The sheikhs agreed to stop harassing British shipping in the Arabian Sea and to recognize Britain as the dominant power in the Persian Gulf. An international agreement among the major powers in 1907 placed the Persian Gulf in the British sphere of influence. Although oil was discovered in the Persian Gulf in 1908, it was not until the 1930s, when major finds were made, that keen international interest in the region revived. Since World War II the Persian Gulf oil fields, among the most productive in the world, have been extensively developed, and modern port facilities have been constructed. Nearly 50% of the world's total oil reserves are estimated to be found in the Persian Gulf.
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Persian culture traces some thousands of years from prehistoric mythic times to the present. In the course of this development from the settlement of Aryan tribes on the Iranian plateau, society developed from nomadic to settled, from religion of nature to the monotheism of Islam, and from tribal to modern representative government. The national epic chronicles the struggles of heroes from the coming of man’s use of fire and minerals, from philosophical teachings of Zoroaster, the tolerance of Cyrus and Alexander, and revival of learning. From ancient times, the concepts of Iranian morality based on triumph of good over evil and duty to right infringement of a just social order have predominated.
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Old Persian, the main language of the Achaemenid inscriptions, should not be confused with the non-Indo-European Elamite language (see Behistun inscription). Over this period, the morphology of the language was simplified from the complex conjugation and declension system of Old Persian to the almost completely regularized morphology and rigid syntax of Modern Persian, in a manner often described as paralleling the development of English. Additionally, many words were introduced from neighboring languages, including Aramaic and Greek in earlier times, and later Arabic and to a lesser extent Turkish. In more recent times, some Western European words have entered the language (notably from French and English).
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Modern Persian appeared during the 9th century. It is written in a version of the Arabic script and is full of words of Arabic origin. There are ... two methods of writing Persian with the Latin alphabet.
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Modern Persian