Alphabet – Lesson 3

So far you have learned all of the six Persian vowels. As we saw, the three short vowels do not appear as independent letters, but merely as diacritics above or below actual letters. This means that they cannot appear at the beginning of words. Thus there is a special way to write them when they appear in the beginning of a word.

Moreover, the three long vowels (“ی”, “و” and “ا”) change form when appearing at the beginning of a word too. The following table indicates how each of the six Persian vowels must be written when it appears at the beginning of a word.

Setting aside its more common usage (a long “ā” sound similar to the "a" in English "father") for a moment, you can consider the letter “ا” in these cases (maybe not the fourth case) as a consonant that sounds like a glottal stop. Thus, a helpful interpretation of what happens is that since a word cannot literally start with a vowel, the glottal stop “ا”, which is a consonant, is written in the beginning of the word before the vowel. If all of this sounds too complicated, simply ignore it and try to memorize the table.

Knowing that the first letter of a word is always a consonant, you can be sure that whenever the letter “و” comes as the first letter of a word, it is definitely going to be pronounced as “v” and not “u”. The same is true of “ی”; you can be sure that it is pronounced as “y” and not “i” when appearing in the beginning of a word.