Editing Persian language (section)

===Middle Persian===
{{Main|Middle Persian}}
[[File:Stone block with Paikuli inscription.JPG|thumb|[[Middle Persian]] text written in [[Inscriptional Pahlavi]] on the [[Paikuli inscription]] from between 293 and 297. [[Sulaymaniyah Museum|Slemani Museum]], [[Iraqi Kurdistan]].]]

The complex [[grammatical conjugation]] and [[declension]] of Old Persian yielded to the structure of Middle Persian in which the dual number disappeared, leaving only singular and plural, as did gender. Middle Persian developed the [[ezāfe]] construction, expressed through ''ī'' (modern ''e/ye''), to indicate some of the relations between words that have been lost with the simplification of the earlier grammatical system.

Although the "middle period" of the Iranian languages formally begins with the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, the transition from Old to Middle Persian had probably already begun before the 4th century BC. However, Middle Persian is not actually attested until 600 years later when it appears in the Sassanid era (224–651 AD) inscriptions, so any form of the language before this date cannot be described with any degree of certainty. Moreover, as a literary language, Middle Persian is not attested until much later, in the 6th or 7th century. From the 8th century onward, Middle Persian gradually began yielding to New Persian, with the middle-period form only continuing in the texts of [[Zoroastrianism]].

Middle Persian is considered to be a later form of the same dialect as Old Persian.<ref>Nicholas Sims-Williams, "The Iranian Languages", in Steever, Sanford (ed.) (1993), ''The Indo-European Languages'', p. 129.</ref> The [[endonym and exonym|native name]] of Middle Persian was ''Parsig'' or ''Parsik'', after the name of the ethnic group of the southwest, that is, "of ''Pars''", Old Persian ''Parsa'', New Persian ''[[Fars province|Fars]]''. This is the origin of the name ''Farsi'' as it is today used to signify New Persian. Following the collapse of the Sassanid state, ''Parsik'' came to be applied exclusively to (either Middle or New) Persian that was written in the [[Arabic script]]. From about the 9th century onward, as Middle Persian was on the threshold of becoming New Persian, the older form of the language came to be erroneously called ''[[Middle Persian|Pahlavi]]'', which was actually but one of the ''writing systems'' used to render both Middle Persian as well as various other Middle Iranian languages. That writing system had previously been adopted by the Sassanids (who were Persians, i.e. from the southwest) from the preceding Arsacids (who were Parthians, i.e. from the northeast). While [[Ibn al-Muqaffa']] (eighth century) still distinguished between ''Pahlavi'' (i.e. Parthian) and ''Persian'' (in Arabic text: al-Farisiyah) (i.e. Middle Persian), this distinction is not evident in Arab commentaries written after that date.