You may notice a discrepancy between the letters in the alphabet column to the right and the letters in our magnetic word samples. That's because the letters in the column are all in detached form, while the letters within words are in different forms depending on where they are in the word.

Take a look at the letters that make the word "fArsi" in the left column. By themselves, they are in the "detached” form. To come together into a word, the "f" has to take the "initial" form, the "A" takes a "final" form, the "s" takes an "initial" form and the "i" takes a "final" form. The "r" remains detached. Why?

Most Persian letters have four forms, “initial”, “medial”, “final” and “detached." Seven letters have only two forms, "final" and "detached."

The Persian alphabet is a semi-cursive alphabet. It has no print form. What you are reading now is print. It is used in printing. Cursive, in contrast, is used in handwriting. Click here for an example of English cursive.

In cursive, the letters join together so the writer doesn’t have to lift up the pen while writing. In a sense, the letters hold hands. If you’re the initial (first) letter in a word, you hold hands with the letter that follows. If you’re a medial (middle) letter, you hold hands on both sides. If you’re the final letter, you hold hands with the letter before you and end with a big flourish. If you’re detached (by yourself), you stand proudly, in full flourish.

Here we show the letter “shin” (ش) in all four forms in the first line. Of course, you never see the first three standing alone like that, they have to connect to something: the second line shows the initial, medial and detached forms highlighted in red, as they occur in the word "shamshirash" which means "his/her/its sword". The last line has the word without red highlights.

Check out the letters “j” (ج) and “b” (ب) below.

B: J:

You may have gathered from this that for most four form letters, the general rule is that the letters will look very similar across their four forms except that the final and detached forms seem to have a tail, or to be bigger.

A few letters ("ye", "he", "qeyn" and "eyn") look very different across their forms.

MORE TO COME! Breathtaking explanations!

Calligraphy

Some people consider typed Persian to be "print" and the fancy script in poetry books to be "cursive". In fact they are both cursive. The fancy stuff is calligraphy. Click here for more on Calligraphy.
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