Grammatical terms in Persian

[So Haleza Grise]

Where do the Persians get their grammatical terms from? From Arabic? From another source?

[Dewrad]

A quick glance at wiktionary indicates that the names of parts of speech at least in Persian are borrowed from Arabic, yeah. Beyond that, I would guess that terminology of more recent vintage (x-bar theory, etc) would either be borrowed from or calqued upon the English.

[Yng]

They're mostly from Arabic, as is a lot of the grammatical theory (i.e. analysing how sentences are constructed etc). We have for example مصدر masdar 'infinitive' from Arabic maṣdar meaning 'verbal noun'. Newer terms though tend to be Persian coinages, partially because of the drive to use Persian roots more during the nationalist period and the lack of equivalent concepts in Arabic grammatical theory - so we have for example واژک vâžak 'morpheme' which is a diminutive of vâze 'word'.

[So Haleza Grise]

Interesting, thanks!

[Yng]

Oh, also - and this is the same in Arabic - a lot of terms from older grammatical theory have been repurposed for linguistics that is not based on that tradition, as you'd expect. So the term for 'predicate' for example is the same, even though the idea of what a predicate is may differ between the two systems.