Period (.)

Question mark (?)

Exclamation mark (!)

Comma (,)

Semicolon (;)

Colon (:)

Quotation marks (“”)

Dash (–)

Ellipsis (…)

Apostrophe (‘)

Brackets ()[]

Slash (/)

Alefbâ ye 2^om is based on the following competing principles:

• Phonemic being of the orthography (to read / write a word in exactly one way)
• Simplicity and reasonability of the rules
• Readability and aesthetics of writing
• Familiarity of the correspondence between the sounds and the letters
• Global availability of the writing infrastructure

Alphabet

Like all other Latin-based alphabets Alefbâ ye 2^om is written from left to right. It has 26 main letters three of which are modified by the circumflex (^) to show their exact pronunciation. The table below shows the letters with some examples and their corresponding phonetic value with regard to the International Phonetic Alphabet, IPA:

The letters ĵ and ŝ have the same phonetic values in Esperanto.

The alphabetical order is: a (â), b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j (ĵ), k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s (ŝ), t, u, v, w, x, y, z.

Vowels

The short vowels are: a, e and o. The long vowels are: â, i and u. The most important diphthong is ow.

Occurance of “y” after “i”

Letter ”y” comes after “i” only in case of gemination (tashdid) or being at the beginning of a word stem:

Diphthong “ow”

If the sounds of “av” are in one syllable, then “av” gets converted to “ow”:

If w occurs syllable-initially in the course of derivation, usually either “ow” is reconverted to “av” (present stem), or “ow” is converted to “ov” (otherwise):

Mul (’)

Mul (derived from the Old Persian mulidan) means pause and corresponds to the letters Eyn and Hamze in the Persian-Arabic script. It is a weak and unstable glottal stop and is indicated by the apostrophe. Mul is only shown in Arabic loanwords:

Mul is not indicated at the beginning of an element:

Mul is shown in inflections, derivations and compounds only if an underlying element would be written with mul on its own:

Iranian proper nouns

A different spelling of Iranian proper nouns, perhaps due to registered entries in official documents, is permitted:

The bound conjunction “e” (ezâfe) may be omitted between first and last name:

Colloquial Persian

Many Persian words, especially present stems and objective / possessive pronouns, have an “abraded” colloquial form. Taking this fact into account all rules defined here can also be applied for writing colloquial Persian.

Contractions

Omitted sounds during contractions are represented by an apostrophe:

Note: Usually, there is no ambiguity with the representation of the mul sound by an apostrophe as mul occurs only in some Arabic loanwords, require always a syllable (vowel) and never occurs at the word beginning. Contractions, on the other hand, take often place in the following cases:

Cases in which ambiguities with mul may happen, e.g. ye’, one (colloquial), are considered to be exceptions.

Gemination (taŝdid)

Gemination occurring normally in Arabic loanwords, is represented by doubling a consonant. Usually, the first one ends a syllable whereas the second one begins the following syllable.

A gemination is indicated, whenever it is pronounced:

Epenthesis & sound transitions

Epenthesis and sound transitions are directly represented in the script:

Solid, spaced and hyphenated writing

Words that follow one another can be a word group or a compound. In rare cases both variants are possible. Word groups and the following cases are written in the spaced form:

Note: Sub-compounds belonging to other parts of speech as well as compounds containing an element without independent use are written in the solid form:

Furthermore, enclitics acting on phrases are written in the spaced form, in contrary to suffixes / endings acting on words. Enclitics can be considered as words without stress as they are phonetically bound to their previous words:

Note: In Persian, if a syllable ends with a consonant which is followed by a vowel, that consonant usually begins the following syllable. This phenomenon can also occur among the words:

The following compounds are written in the hyphenated form:

The solid form is the default form for writing compounds. Furthermore word forms and derivatives are also written in the solid form:

Numbers

Compound cardinal numbers less than 100 as well as the hundreds are written in the solid form:

Ordinal numbers, fractions as well as compounds including numbers are written in the solid form:

The decimal part of a number is separated by a period. A comma is placed after each three digits to the left for numbers with at least four digits:

Capitalization

Sentence beginnings, titles, headlines, proper nouns and forms of address before and after proper nouns are capitalized. Proper nouns refer to names of persons, animals, things (products, works and objects), organizations, geographic locations and unique events:

Proper nouns are not capitalized in derivations and compounds:

Foreign words and loanwords

Names of individuals, companies, products and registered trademarks are written 1-1. Loanwords are written according to their Persian pronunciations. Foreign words are written in italics. Other proper nouns of foreign origin are either written according to their Persian pronunciations or 1-1 but in italics. In all cases diacritics can be omitted:

Abbreviations

For a compound or a word group, at least letters from all nouns should be used for abbreviations. For a compound in the solid form a dot is used. Otherwise each word is abbreviated individually with a dot but without a space:

With regard to the case-sensitiveness, the abbreviations follow their written out forms. If a word is abbreviated with capital letters, then no dots will be used.

Acronyms such as UNESCO can also be written as written out words, so Unesco. International abbreviations of units of measurement, such as cm and GB are written 1-1.

For the calendar, the following abbreviations are available:

For the Iranian month names, the following abbreviations are used:

For the Christian names of the months, the following abbreviations are used:

For the weekdays, the following abbreviations are used:

Date & Time

Date can optionally be expressed as follows:

Date can optionally be expressed as follows:

Syllabification

For the syllabification, one goes through a word from right to left and stops at the first vowel. If a consonant other than w occurs after the vowel, this is the beginning of a syllable. Otherwise, the vowel itself is the beginning of a syllable, and so on:

Typing / relaxing diacritical letters

Using the Canadian Multilingual Standard Keyboard layout (preinstalled in Windows) the diacritical letters â, ĵ, and ŝ can be obtained by entering the circumflex (^) followed by the corresponding base letter. A similar extended keyboard layout is provided for many other countries. The Standard Alefbâ ye 2^om Keyboard layout makes it possible to enter the diacritical letters directly.  For details on keyboard layouts see Keyboard layouts.

If the diacritical letters are not available / applicable, they can be relaxed as follows:

Letter â can be relaxed to aa or a.

Letter ĵ is relaxed to jh.

Letter ŝ is relaxed to sh.

If the apostrophe is not applicable (e.g. in URLs), it is omitted.

Replace the Persian-Arabic script? 

Since the end of the 19th Century and completely independent of the problematic situation of Iranians living abroad, the calls for replacing the Persian-Arabic script by an easier-to-learn script have been getting more prominent. Most of the time, Latin and sometimes also the ancient Avestan script have been proposed as bases for a new script. An entirely new script would also be a possibility. Although the proponents of such a project suggest a gradual introduction and provide a substantially automated transfer of the existing literature based on the current advances in computer technology in prospect, the opponents are afraid of a break with the cultural past, to put it bluntly.

Way out: A second alphabet

A way out to this dilemma seems to be a second, parallel script. The current script will continue to be used. It will not get replaced, but just supplemented by the second script. A look at the Iranian history shows that parallel writings were also in use in the past.

Approach to design Alefbâ ye 2^om

In addition to various publications on Persian grammar and spelling, recent proposals/discussions for transcription / orthography and spell checking of the Persian were studied in depth, including the respective links listed below:

1. Âmuzeŝ e tarânevisi, transcripta.blogfa.com
2. Dabire, ida.liu.se/~jalma/dabire/dabire.pdf
3. Dastur e xatt e fârsi, persianacademy.ir/fa/das.aspx
4. Dastur e xatt e tâjiki, noormags.com/view/fa/articlepage/595488
5. Desphilic, desphilic.com
6. eFarsi, ida.liu.se/~jalma/efarsi.pdf
7. Eurofãrsi, eurofarsi.com
8. Fârsinevisi bâ alefbâ ye Lâtin: bâcenevisi; cegunenevisi
9. Pârsiye Jahâni, unipers.com
10. Pársik, persiandirect.com/projects/ipa2
11. Persik, puyescgaraan.com/Persik.htm
12. Piŝnahâd e avvaliyye barâ ye xatt e fanni e fârsi, masudkhayyam.com; forum.persianlanguage.ir/topic/4
13. Virastyar, virastyar.ir

By drawing on the above proposals and developing them further, a consistent and comprehensive method of transcribing the Persian was constructed on the basis of the Latin alphabet and optimized by applications in various iterations with approximately 15,000 words, phrases and compositions. This method carries the name Alefbâ ye 2^om (2^nd Alphabet).

Next steps

Alefbâ ye 2^om serves as the basis for the creation of a multilingual dictionary and spell check extensions (word list and rules) to be integrated with Office applications and browsers. These tools are designated to support those who intend to publish content in this script.