When did persia stop being persia but Iran?
The language “Persian” is not Farsi, as many think “New Persian or Persian for short is described linguistically as an Indo-European language. It is categorised as one of the Modern Iranian languages, along with Kurdish, Baluchi, Pashto, Ossetic and number of other languages. It is a member of the Western Iranian branch of the Iranian languages, which are themselves a subgroup of the Indo-Iranian (or Indo-Aryan) family of languages. As such, Persian is distantly related to the vast majority of European languages, including English. Over the past three millennia, Persian has developed through three distinct stages of Old, Middle and New. New Persian is a successor to, and derived directly from Middle Persian, and can be considered as having two phases: classical and modern – although both variants are mutually intelligible[1]. The period after the Islamic conquest is described by Iranian scholars as the ‘Two Centuries of Silence’. There is no inscriptional or textual evidence for New Pe
