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Old Persian is one of the two attested forms of Old Iranian languages. Old Persian appears primarily in the inscriptions, clay tablets, seals of the Achaemenid era (c. 600 BCE to 300 BCE). Examples of Old Persian have been found in present-day Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Egypt.
Comparative linguistics classifies Old Persian as a Southwestern Iranian language, in the group of Iranian languages, which is one of the two subgroups of Indo-Iranian languages. This latter group is one of the branches of the Indo-European language family.
Unlike Avestan, which is the other attested Old Iranian language, Old Persian remained a living language. By the late Achaemenid era, Old Persian had begun to evolve into Middle Persian, which eventually became the language of state under the Sassanids (3rd-7th c. CE). Middle Persian is in turn the precursor of the Modern Persian language.
Old Persian "presumably"[1] has a Median language substrate. The Median element is readily identifyable because it did not share in the developments that were peculiar to Old Persian. Median forms "are found only in personal or geographical names [...] and some are typically from religious vocabulary and so could in principle also be influenced by Avestan." "Sometimes, both Median and Old Persian forms are found, which gave Old Persian a somewhat confusing and inconsistent look: 'horse,' for instance, is [attested in Old Persian as] both asa (OPers.) and aspa (Med.)." [1]
Old Persian was written from left to right in Old Persian cuneiform script, a semi-alphabetic syllabic Cuneiform script. Old Persian cuneiform contains 36 signs which represent consonants, vowels, or sequences of single consonants plus vowels, a set of three numerals (1, 10, 100), a word divider, and a few ideograms.
The following phonemes are expressed in the Old Persian script:
Vowels
Consonants
Old Persian stems:<br>
Adjectives are declinable in similar way.
Voices<br> Active, Middle (them. pres. -aiy-, -ataiy-), Passive (-ya-).
In Old Persian were used mostly the forms of first and third persons. Only Dual form used was ajīvatam 'both lived'.