Elementary Persian Grammar

by Lawrence Paul Elwell-Sutton

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.

250 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

Reviews

[M. Jane Colette · Rating 3 out of 5]

Challenging! But useful... to me. I think folks who aren't used to learning new languages will be turned off: it took me weeks to work through the first chapters--I had to pass to other, easier books for a while before coming back to it--and I think I will continue to have work through it possibly through years.

But very, very good for the determined student.