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Arabic vs Persian: Similar Script, Completely Different Languages
You can learn to read every letter on a Persian page and still not understand a single sentence. The alphabet travelled. The language underneath it did not.
Put two newspapers side by side, one printed in Cairo and one printed in Tehran. Both run right to left. Both use joined letters with dots above and below. Both have the same curves, the same loops, the same long horizontal strokes. If you can’t read either one, you will swear they are the same language, or at least two dialects of it.
Now hand the Tehran paper to a reader from Cairo. She can sound out most of the words. She will recognise a noun here and there, maybe one word in four. She will not be able to tell you what a single headline says.
That gap is the subject of this article. Arabic and Persian share a script and a large stock of vocabulary, and almost nothing else. Their grammar, their sounds, their way of building words and their family history have no common origin. If you are learning Arabic, or deciding between the two, you need to know exactly where the overlap stops, because it stops much earlier than the page suggests.
