Editing Middle Persian (section)

=== Transition to New Persian ===
The modern-day descendants of Middle Persian are [[Persian language#New Persian|New Persian]] and [[Luri language|Luri]]. The changes between late Middle and Early New Persian were very gradual, and in the 10th–11th centuries, Middle Persian texts were still intelligible to speakers of Early New Persian.  However, there are definite differences that had taken place already by the 10th century:

* sound changes, such as
**the dropping of unstressed initial [[vowel]]s
**the [[epenthesis]] of vowels in initial [[consonant]] clusters
**the loss of -g when word final
**change of initial w- to either b- or gw- → g-
* changes in the verbal system, notably the loss of distinctive subjunctive and optative forms, and the increasing use of verbal prefixes to express verbal moods
* a transition from [[split ergative]] back to consistent [[nominative-accusative]] [[morphosyntactic alignment]]<ref name="ReferenceA"/><ref>{{cite conference |first=Martin Joachim |last=Kümmel |year=2018 |title=Areal developments in the history of Iranic: West vs. East |conference=University of Jena. Talk given at Workshop 7, Discovering (micro-)areal patterns in Eurasia |page=27 |url=https://societaslinguistica.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/SLE-2018-Book-of-abstracts.pdf#page=445 }}</ref>
* changes in the vocabulary, particularly the establishment of a [[stratum (linguistics)|superstratum or adstratum]] of Arabic loanwords replacing many Aramaic loans and native terms.
* the substitution of the Pahlavi script for the Arabic script