Contracted Forms in Persian and English Orthography

Document Type : Original Article

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Full Professor in General Linguistics, Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Colloquialism is a general term referring to a writing style used by writers in order to represent the spoken language. Part of colloquialism has to do with contracted forms. Persian contracted‌ forms can be considered, with some tolerance, as equivalent to short forms in English, with the difference that although most Persian contracted forms are shorter in number of phonemes than their full forms, in some cases the contracted Persian forms are exactly the same size as their full forms or even longer. It should be noted that most Persian contracted forms are shorter than their full forms in terms of the number of phonemes (e.g., “می‌رم/ می‌روم miravam/mirm”), but in some cases, the Persian broken forms are exactly the same size as the intact form (e.g., “اگر/ اگه agar/age”; “خانه/ خونهXane/Xune”; “را/ رو ra/ro”), and in a few cases, they are even longer than them (e.g., “بش/ به او beʃ/be ’u”). In fact, contracted forms in Persian include short forms as well as forms that have no exact equivalent or counterpart in English orthography. The relatively large number of these latter forms in Persian, and their absence in English, indicates the existence of a kind of long-standing diglossia in

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