ABSTRACT
The development and use of Middle Persian (Pehlevi - see Campbell 1991) was interrupted in 642 when the Arabs conquered Iran. When Persian reappears in the tenth century it is not based on any one identifiable Middle Persian dialect, it is rich in Arabic loan-words and it is written in the Arabic script. It should be pointed out, however, that Persian was Arabicized only as regards the appropriation of A rabic lexical items, including the broken plural and the derived stems (see Arabic). Thus, while the root 'Z L , for example, is not conjugated in Persian, its passive participle appears in compound verbs plus auxiliary: e.g. m a'zul shodan ‘to be dismissed’, m a'zu l kardan ‘to dismiss’. There are thousands of such Arabo-Persian complexes in the language, but Persian structure itself was hardly modified to accommodate this new and inexhaustible influx.
