A Diachronic survey on Persian active and passive participles etymology; along with educational content analysis in the old and new high school books.

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Assistant Professor, Department of Persian Language and Literature, Farhangian University, Tehran, IRAN.

Abstract

Active and passive participles belong to the descriptive-agentive category of adjectives. The education of these adjectives is considered in Iran’s high school curriculum. The purpose of this descriptive analysis is a diachronic survey on the formation of these adjectives in the three Persian language periods and showing the evolution of their suffixes. The study showed some active present participle suffixes were omitted during the evolution from the ancient to the middle period, Also the past participle suffix ‘-ta’ was changed to ‘d’/’t’ and merged to the past stem. The active and passive suffixes of the middle period are all transferred to New Persian through some phonological evolutions. The comparison of the old and new high school books indicated that in the new system, the education of the mentioned subjects was limited to one lesson in the 11th grade. This study suggested that as root (‘bon’ in Persian) had just been used in the ancient period; and later been deleted and substituted with ‘stem’ (‘setāk’ in Persian) in the middle and new periods, using ‘bon’ as the stem, could not be an accurate term in New Persian grammar.

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