"Many Americans seem to entertain the illusion that Iranians are
Arabs. This may be due to the fact that many people in both
communities practise Islam, which I'll mention below. Another
coincidence that may have contributed to this confusion is the
apparent similarity of the names Iran and Iraq. It is true that the
Persian language and the Arabic share the same alphabet, namely the
Arabic alphabet, which was imposed upon the Iranians centuries ago. But originally Persian had its own alphabet. Anyway, in Arabic script
the names of the countries are entirely different, 'Iraq' beginning
with the letter 'ain' and 'Iran' beginning with the letter 'alif'. The
words 'Iranian' and 'Persian' are virtually synonymous, the former
being the preferred term nowadays... The word 'Iran' is cognate with
the English word 'Aryan', as the Iranians are Aryan, that is,
Indo-European, while the Arabs, as is well known, are Semitic, so
ethnologically there's a definite disjunction. The Indo-European
languages, which probably coincide in fair measure with ethnicity, are
divided into Centum and Satem groups. Centum languages further
divide into Germanic, Italic, Celtic and Greek, while Satem languages
divide into Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Albanian and Armenian.
Thus we find among Indo-European languages such widely divergent
specimens as English, German, Spanish, French, Greek, Russian,
Persian (Farsi), Hindi and many others.
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"Persian has undergone many changes in the past two millennia, the
most significant of which has most certainly been the influence of
Arabic since the Islamic conquest of Persia in the year 650. Over the
years, Persian has borrowed up to half of its vocabulary from Arabic
as well as certain grammatical elements. This impact of Arabic is
profound not only because of its magnitude but because the sounds and
syntax of Arabic, a Semitic language, are so different than those of
Persian. Since the Middle Ages, Persian has been written in a modified
form of the Arabic alphabet, although in pre-Islamic times it was
written in an older alphabet known as Pahlavi...
The Persian Sassanid dynasty that had been a dominant empire in the
Middle East was defeated by the Muslim Arabs in the seventh century
and Iranians enthusiastically embraced Islam. Persian language and
culture went into a decline for several hundred years. During this
time, Arabic was the language of study for both religious and secular
purposes. Persian remained a spoken language only and even so was
greatly influenced by Arabic. The earlier Persian writing system was
forgotten as was much of the pre-Islamic religion and folklore. Only
in the tenth century did a number of Persian poets and intellectuals
begin to use the Arabic writing system to write Persian." ...
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