Elementary Persian Grammar

Book excerpt: Mr Elwell-Sutton's book provides a simple grammatical framework for contemporary written Persian. It is based on the characteristic idiom and phraseology of the language as it is used in newspapers, magazines and novels. The student is introduced to Persian script from the first lesson. Words are fully vocalized in the early lessons, but vowels are progressively discarded; they are, however, shown in the vocabulary. The letter-forms of printed Persian are used cursive scripts. Although the structure of the language is Mr Elwell-Sutton's immediate concern, he has given close attention to the need for acquiring a workable vocabulary. The examples and exercises thus require only a limited vocabulary of words in fairly common use - about 1500 in all. The student is also given help with pronunciation; at the ends of lessons sample sentences from the exercises are printed with diacritics showing the intonation and stress of each syllable. At the end of the book there is a key to the lessons.