Indo-Iranian Languages Research Articles

The Indo-Iranian Approach to Greater Iran

ABSTRACT With an origin in western Eurasia, the Indo-Iranian languages appeared in Greater Iran and beyond in the second millennium and were expressed widely in the first millennium BCE. Considering an early separation of Proto-Iranian from the Proto-Indo-Iranian linguistic core, Eurasian archaeological cultures affiliated with Indo-Iranians are revisited. While the Sintashta and Petrovka cultures, along with the Alakul Andronovo cultural complex, are plausible reflections of the Proto-Indo-Aryans, the situation is more complex for the Proto-Iranians who later shaped the cultures of the Scythians and Iranians of Greater Iran. Tracing the origins of these Proto-Iranians in the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor and Central Asia, their possible expansion into Greater Iran, partly separated from the Proto-Indo-Aryan path, is demonstrated. An Iranian-speaking group in Transoxiana, distinct from the Iranians of Greater Iran, is also discussed with the Proto-Iranian affiliated Timber Grave culture of western Eurasia as one of its possible components.

К ВОПРОСУ О ТОПОНИМАХ ИНДОИРАНСКОГО ПРОИСХОЖДЕНИЯ, СВЯЗАННЫХ С ВОДНЫМИ ОБЪЕКТАМИ НА ТЕРРИТОРИИ СРЕДНЕГО ПРИИРТЫШЬЯ (по материалам Павлодарской, Восточно-Казахстанской и Абайской областей)

The article is devoted to the systematization and description of toponyms associated with water bodies on the territory of the Middle Irtysh region, the origin of which may be associated with Indo-Iranian languages. Despite the controversial origin of the names of certain geographical names, their analysis contributes to solving problems not only in terms of studying the chronological layers of toponymy of Kazakhstan, but also in the context of studying the history and culture of the population that once lived here. It indicates the historical binding of toponyms that may be associated with native speakers of Indo-Iranian languages who, according to some researchers, lived in the designated area during the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age. Before the era of writing and cartography, orientation in deserted mountains was a problem, recognition of an object on the ground occurred by the oral name of the place, the name of which briefly and succinctly indicated one or two noticeable and distinctive features of the object and the surrounding area. Rivers (hydronyms) have the most stable names in time, as well as some tracts and notable mountains located near ancient communications, near historical places of residence and important in the life support and management of people. The names of villages often came from the names of rivers and from the geomorphological assessment of the settlement site, reflecting the space and terrain, taking into account the properties of the object and its degree of significance for people. Sometimes a toponym denoting a local object can expand its meaning, or the name is transferred to neighboring objects, usually the name of the river is transferred to the name of the gorge, but sometimes vice versa, the name. rivers are often transferred to the name. Toponyms appeared as man mastered the mountains, in the form of "toponymic corridors" corresponding to ancient pack trails, passes and valleys and hollows convenient for settling. The scientific novelty of the study consists in the analysis and interpretation of toponyms of Indo-Iranian origin associated with water bodies in the Middle Priirtysh region, based on materials from Pavlodar, East Kazakhstan and Abay regions. The study makes it possible to trace historical connections and the influence of Indo-Iranian peoples on the formation of the toponymic landscape of this territory, as well as to contribute to the understanding of the processes of migration and cultural exchange in the region. The methodological approach may include a comprehensive examination and comparison of different data sources, interdisciplinary analysis, use of the comparative method, etc. It is also important to consider the context of the study, the resources available and the objectives of the study to select the most appropriate methods and methodology. It is also important to consider the research context, available resources and research objectives in order to select the most appropriate methods and methodology.

The Indo-European (IE) Linguistic Spread and the ‘Homeland Problem’ Revisited

The nineteenth and early twentieth-century intellectual claim to European ancestry stems from the ‘Aryan Myth’—the linguistic equating of Iranians as direct descendants of Aryans, or Indo-Europeans. The historical genesis of the word ‘Aryan’ was influenced by The First Persian Empire (550-330 B.C.E.) in reference to an Iranian homeland, and by nineteenth-century Western linguists’ associations with the ancestral Indo-Europeans (IE).1 Notable philologists examining the ‘homeland problem’ have shown a standard concern towards the accuracy of scholarship on Indo-European origins. Ara (2008) decodes Indo-European origins and spread that gradually led to affiliations between Indo-Iranians and the ‘Aryan’ label. The onomastics approach would suggest that the proto-language left identifiable clues in the landscape itself (Mallory & Adams, 2006, p. 447). Dyen’s (1956) linguistic migration and homeland theory cites a European homeland accepted since the nineteen hundreds. Nichols’ (1997) analysis of the Indo-European migrations from 4,000 to 3,500 B.C.E. points to a locus of language dispersal within western central Asia (p. 134). Mallory (1989) and Kuzmina (1994a) favor a Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Pontic-Caspian steppe region from the fifth to fourth millennium B.C.E.2 (Lamberg-Karlovsky, 2004, p. 142). The accurate whereabouts of the Indo-European and daughter Indo-Iranian language group have been reviewed from various fields and by abundant methodologies, including the eschatological, anthropological, linguistic, and archaeological—all adding to the convoluted nature of scholarship on the Aryan question. The academic search for an Iranian homeland raises the inquiry of how ethnicity and region become tantamount to politicized and prejudiced topics on the account of misappropriations of a linguistic concept. An archaeological and lexicostatistic excavation of the conservative nature to review the genesis of Aryan homeland origins may help diverge from the aggrandized ethnological, ethnographic, and anthropometric evidence that has ramified an essentialist nomenclature of the Indo-Iranians in the eighteen and nineteen hundreds.

TURKISH SIMILAR WORDS IN QUECHUA CORPUS

Quechua is a South American indigenous language, spoken by eight to twelve million people across six South American countries, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. The theory of multi-wave migrations of Asian tribes through the Bering Straight inside the Americas, invoked academic studies to search for probable linguistic and cultural kinship between the languages of native peoples of Americas and the languages of Asian nations, such as Turkish, Mongolian and Indoiranian language families. The motivation for the present study was to investigate Quechuan living word inventory from the viewpoint of searching any probable correlation with Turkish Language. With this aim, a field-compiled three-dialectal dictionary of Quechuan Language by Parker (1964) was focused. The dictionary has been published as a fieldwork report resume: English-Quechua Dictionary- Cuzco, Ayacucho and Cochabamba. Having found a significant number of Turkish-sounding words with similar meanings, the author concludes that the living vocabulary of these three dialects of the Quechua carries evidence indicating the presence of a correlation with the languages of Turks in Asia. The findings are tabulated under the headlines in English, Quechuan and Turkish. The study is hoped to invoke further and more detailed similar works.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0009/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Дуудах тийн ялгалын асуудалд олон хэлний хэвшинж судлалын үүднээс хандах нь

This article considers morphological forms of addressing and calling as vocative cases. The research is focused on previous cross-linguistic studies on the vocative case, theoretical backround of the vocative case, marking of the vocative case in languages, vocative syntax of languages and some issues of vocative syntax of Modern Mongolian. Theoretical part includes evolution of case systems, marking of cases in languages, morphological and prosodic forms of vocative cases. Although some Indo-European languages lost their vocative case forms, Baltic languages, Slavonic languages, Indo-Iranian languages of Indo- European family and Georgian language of Iberian-Caucasian family have vocative cases. At the end of the article addressing and calling forms in modern Mongolian are considered in the framework of vocative syntax. We agree that vocative cases in languages exist between system and performance.

A contrastive analysis study between Arabic and Pashto languages vowels

This brief and intensive study explore the importance of vowels. It is a library research which is conducted to find out what will happen if we violet the vowels during speaking and writing. So we could not communicate the message accurately and we also cannot convey the sense of a source text to target text properly.This is a phonological study of Arabic and Pashto. The author has compared an Indo Iranian language with a Semitic language. The Pashto being spoken by the Pashtun tribe of Afghanistan and North West frontier and Baluchistan provinces of Pakhtonkhowa.The study however is limited to the standard variety of Arabic and Pashto.The study being with an introduction to the cardinal vowel scale.Arabic and Pashto vowels have been placed on this scale to prove scientifically their similarities and differences. The place and manner of articulation for each of the Arabic and Pashto vowels has been discussed. These have been placed in differed words initially medially and finally for comparison.

Enhancing reading capability of young Thai students with augmented reality technology: Design-based research

The Thai language, which is part of the Indo-Iranian language family, carries on rituals and local knowledge that have been passed down from generation to generation. The Thai National Statistics Office found that 10% of elementary school students in Thailand cannot read. This means that 90% of elementary school students in Thailand can read. The numbers disagree with a report from an international assessment agency that said young Thai students’ reading skills were the 50<sup>th</sup> best out of 65 countries. So, it is still hard for young Thai people to read well. The main goals of this research are to: (i) make an augmented reality platform that will help students improve their reading skills and (ii) figure out how well the platform works. This study uses a method called “research design” (R&D) to look at how students feel about an educational product or method that was designed and then used. Research and development can be thought of as going through three different stages (research phase, development phase, and implementation phase). According to the results, the picture word inductive model (PWIM) strategy was put into place because the professionals said it should be. The most popular method of teaching was called “precision teaching.” Reading out loud and reading the same thing over and over were two ways that vocabulary was taught. According to the results of the experiment, the students’ scores after finishing the reading are higher than their scores after the first reading. As part of the second part of the study, reading comprehension skills were tested. The students have also gotten a lot better at understanding what they read as a whole.

Loan Words from Turkish into Kurdish

This study entitled "Loan words from Turkish into Kurdish” is an attempt to clarify and reveal a number of words which are in Kurdish and whose origin goes back to Turkish. The researchers try to answer these research questions. How and in which way has the Kurdish language benefited from those words, have the words been taken as they are, or have they been changed in terms of their phonemes, morphemes and meaning? What are the reasons that made Kurdish language loan Turkish words and use them in its dictionary? Based on the fact that the Kurdish and Turkish languages are not from the same group and family and there is no relationship between them, but some other reasons such as neighborhood, political, economic, social, scientific, etc., resulted in the interaction between those two languages and have loaned words from one another, that the researchers are willing to shed light only on those words that have been placed into Kurdish language from Turkish. The researchers have tried to clarify their foundations and explain their morphology, to learn more about our dictionary so as to distinguish pure Kurdish words from those of borrowed in other dialects of the world. The recent study composes of an introduction, three parts, conclusions and the list of references. The first part is allocated to the definition, the concept of language, characteristics of language, Indo-European languages and the family of the Indo-Iranian Languages. In the second part, the definition of words, methods of taking words and reasons for borrowing words has been presented. The third part deals with the practical side of taking the Turkish words from Kurdish language have been revealed. At first, a brief history has presented to Turkmen in Iraq, then; the reasons behind borrowing words from Turkish into Kurdish, and finally the results and the list of sources have presented.

Maimani Language and Lawati Language: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

The concomitance of several minority languages side by side with Arabic has played a significant role in enriching Oman’s linguistic diversity. Associated largely with the home domain, the vitality of these languages is highly dependent on the attention availed by their own native speakers to their usage and inter-generational transmission. The existence of some of these languages is not commonly recognised, nor is their status failsafe. Owing to a certain degree of lexical resemblance amongst these languages, inter alia, some of them are often viewed and presented as dialects of one another rather than distinct languages of their own, a fact that has fed into unmeant obliviousness of their existence. Unbeknownst to many people even in Oman, Maimani is one unique case that merits exploration. Due to some unsubstantiated linguistic and ethnic considerations, Maimani is often mistakenly viewed as a dialect diverging from Baluchi, an Indo-Iranian language spoken in Oman as well as other homeland countries such as Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan. This paper, to that effect, is an attempt to cast some light on this understudied language and to bring it some due notice. A closer look at a sample of its lexicon based on the Swadesh one hundred word list reveals that Maimani has a slight portion of shared lexical items with Baluchi and a minimal degree of mutual intelligibility. Contrary to expectation, Maimani has plenty of common lexical items with Lawati, another nearby member of the Indo-Iranian language family that is not commonly linked to Maimani. The findings show that Maimani lexical resemblance and mutual intelligibility to Lawati is greatly significant that they appear to be dichotomous varieties branching from the same language.

The emergence of bunched vowels from retroflex approximants in endangered Dardic languages

Abstract Kalasha, an endangered Dardic (Indo-Aryan) language, contrasts a rich set of rhotic vowels, a vowel type, which is found in less than 1% of the world’s languages. The acoustic and articulatory correlates of rhotic vowels, and their development and geographical distribution in Kalasha and other Indo-Iranian languages are still poorly understood. The current study brings together typological data on retroflex approximants and flaps in 192 Indo-Iranian language varieties, and phonetic data on rhotic vowels and retroflex approximants in endangered Dardic (Kalasha and Dameli) and Nuristani (Kamviri and Eastern Kataviri) languages. The phylogeography of retroflex approximants and flaps indicates that rhotic vowels are prevalent in those areas of South Asia where retroflex approximants are in abundance. Specifically, the development of rhotic vowels in Kalasha may have been amplified by the presence of retroflex approximants in neighboring Nuristani languages. We show that phonetically the rhotic sounds in the two Dardic languages are produced with a bunched tongue shape, whereas the retroflex approximants in Nuristani languages are produced with the raising of the tongue tip.

Post-focus compression in Brahvi and Balochi.

Previous research has shown that post-focus compression (PFC)- the reduction of pitch range and intensity after a focused word in an utterance, is a robust means of marking focus, but it is present only in some languages. The presence of PFC appears to follow language family lines. The present study is a further exploration of the distribution of PFC by investigating Brahvi, a Dravidian language, and Balochi, an Indo-Iranian language. Balochi is predicted to show PFC given its presence in other Iranian languages. Dravidian languages have not been studied for prosodic focus before and they are not related to any languages with PFC. We recorded twenty native speakers from each language producing declarative sentences in different focus conditions. Acoustic analyses showed that,in both languages, post-focus f0 and other correlates were significantly reduced relative to baseline neutral-focus sentences, but post-focus lowering of f0, and intensity was greater in magnitude in Balochi than in Brahvi. The Balochi results confirm our prediction, while the Brahvi results offer the first evidence ofPFC in a Dravidian language. The finding of PFC in a Dravidian language is relevant to a postulated origin of PFC, which is related to the controversial Nostratic Macrofamily hypothesis.

ПАЛЕОБАЛКАНСЬКІ МОВИ В КОНТЕКСТІ ГЕНЕАЛОГІЧНОЇ КЛАСИФІКАЦІЇ: ЛІНГВОІСТОРІОГРАФІЧНИЙ АСПЕКТ

The purpose of the article is to reveal the features of the study of relict Paleo-Balkan languages in their connection with other Indo-European languages in linguistics of the second half of the XIX century – the beginning of the XXI century. It is noted that when identifying a group of Paleo-Balkan languages, a single criterion has not yet been clearly established: both areal and genetic principles are involved. At the same time the material of Paleo-Balkan languages is not fully taken into account in the genealogical classification of Indo-European languages; if Thracian, Phrygian, and Illyrian languages are included in this classification as separate groups, then the place of old Macedonian, “Pelasgian”, and other Paleo-Balkan languages in the classification is not defined. In addition, the traditional genealogical classification does not take into account the special proximity of Paleo-Balkan languages to Armenian, Albanian and Ancient Greek. The discovery and study of Paleo-Balkan languages are briefly described. The connections of Paleo-Balkan languages with Albanian, Armenian, Ancient Greek, Hittite, Luvian, Baltic, Germanic, Slavic and Indo-Iranian languages are revealed. The author of the article focuses on the fact that Paleo-Balkan languages are mainly reconstructed at the phonological, lexical, derivational levels (to a lesser extent – at the morphological and syntactic levels), although due to the limited and uneven corresponding data, such reconstruction is also limited, and in some cases contradictory. From the point of view of Indo-Europeanists, lexical elements of Paleo-Balkan origin are recorded in modern Albanian, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian and Armenian. The article emphasizes that Paleo-Balcanistics provided significant factual material important for substrate theory and contributed to the development of the linguistic stratigraphy method.

Conceptualization of time in Pashto language

Past studies have investigated metaphoric correlations between time and space or objects from cognitive semantic perspective in different anguages, drawing interesting similarities and cultural differences in the conceptualization of time. This paper departs from the existing literature by examining the concept of time in Pashto language from a cognitive semantic perspective based on the theoretical model of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (hereafter CMT) to find out various conceptual etaphors (hereafter CM) for time in Pashto language and poetry. Linguistic data of 150 sentences and clauses were extracted from the Pashto-English dictionary (Zeeya, 2009), Da Ghani Kulyat (Ghani 1985), Dewan Abdur Rahman Baba (Rahman, 1947), Tsraagh (Saqib, 2019) and everyday language on the basis of topical words and phrases conveying the concept of time. The topical words and phrases technique was used to retrieve the clauses or sentences denoting the concept/theme of time. CMT was used to analyze the clauses and sentences to investigate the source domains which structure the abstract concept of time in Pashto. Eight metaphors for the representation of time emerge from the analysis: i) time is object in motion; ii) time is a thing; iii) time is bounded space; iv) moments of time are landmarks in space and past is in the front, while future is at the back; v) time is person; vi) Time is measurable quantity; vii) time is a valuable commodity; and viii) time passing is tasting it. Contrary to English, Pashto speakers locate past time in the front while locating the future at the back. The present paper recommends further studies in Pashto language from cognitive semantic perspective to examine the tenets of CMT in Indo-Iranian languages to investigate its cross-cultural implications.

The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes

Domestication of horses fundamentally transformed long-range mobility and warfare1. However, modern domesticated breeds do not descend from the earliest domestic horse lineage associated with archaeological evidence of bridling, milking and corralling2–4 at Botai, Central Asia around 3500 bc3. Other longstanding candidate regions for horse domestication, such as Iberia5 and Anatolia6, have also recently been challenged. Thus, the genetic, geographic and temporal origins of modern domestic horses have remained unknown. Here we pinpoint the Western Eurasian steppes, especially the lower Volga-Don region, as the homeland of modern domestic horses. Furthermore, we map the population changes accompanying domestication from 273 ancient horse genomes. This reveals that modern domestic horses ultimately replaced almost all other local populations as they expanded rapidly across Eurasia from about 2000 bc, synchronously with equestrian material culture, including Sintashta spoke-wheeled chariots. We find that equestrianism involved strong selection for critical locomotor and behavioural adaptations at the GSDMC and ZFPM1 genes. Our results reject the commonly held association7 between horseback riding and the massive expansion of Yamnaya steppe pastoralists into Europe around 3000 bc8,9 driving the spread of Indo-European languages10. This contrasts with the scenario in Asia where Indo-Iranian languages, chariots and horses spread together, following the early second millennium bc Sintashta culture11,12.

Ancient Mitochondrial Genomes Reveal Extensive Genetic Influence of the Steppe Pastoralists in Western Xinjiang.

The population prehistory of Xinjiang has been a hot topic among geneticists, linguists, and archaeologists. Current ancient DNA studies in Xinjiang exclusively suggest an admixture model for the populations in Xinjiang since the early Bronze Age. However, almost all of these studies focused on the northern and eastern parts of Xinjiang; the prehistoric demographic processes that occurred in western Xinjiang have been seldomly reported. By analyzing complete mitochondrial sequences from the Xiabandi (XBD) cemetery (3,500–3,300 BP), the up-to-date earliest cemetery excavated in western Xinjiang, we show that all the XBD mitochondrial sequences fall within two different West Eurasian mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) pools, indicating that the migrants into western Xinjiang from west Eurasians were a consequence of the early expansion of the middle and late Bronze Age steppe pastoralists (Steppe_MLBA), admixed with the indigenous populations from Central Asia. Our study provides genetic links for an early existence of the Indo-Iranian language in southwestern Xinjiang and suggests that the existence of Andronovo culture in western Xinjiang involved not only the dispersal of ideas but also population movement.

Syntax Comparison of Simple Tenses in English, Kurdish and Turkish

This study focuses on (1) Turkic languages in the Altaic branch of the Ural-Altaic language group of Asian languages, and also (2) the Kurdish language in the group of Indo-Iranian languages, dialects of which are spoken in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, as well as (3) the English language in the Germanic languages of the European group. The syntax-cases of tenses are investigated. Four simple tenses, namely simple present, simple present continuous, simple past and future tense are examined individually. Then, these tenses are compared to each other. As a result of the comparison, the syntax-cases of the languages investigated are revealed. Then it was found that there are both similarities and differences in terms of syntax-cases between the language groups examined.

Surprise Language Challenge: Developing a Neural Machine Translation System between Pashto and English in Two Months

In the media industry and the focus of global reporting can shift overnight. There is a compelling need to be able to develop new machine translation systems in a short period of time and in order to more efficiently cover quickly developing stories. As part of the EU project GoURMET and which focusses on low-resource machine translation and our media partners selected a surprise language for which a machine translation system had to be built and evaluated in two months(February and March 2021). The language selected was Pashto and an Indo-Iranian language spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan and India. In this period we completed the full pipeline of development of a neural machine translation system: data crawling and cleaning and aligning and creating test sets and developing and testing models and and delivering them to the user partners. In this paperwe describe rapid data creation and experiments with transfer learning and pretraining for this low-resource language pair. We find that starting from an existing large model pre-trained on 50languages leads to far better BLEU scores than pretraining on one high-resource language pair with a smaller model. We also present human evaluation of our systems and which indicates that the resulting systems perform better than a freely available commercial system when translating from English into Pashto direction and and similarly when translating from Pashto into English.

THE UKRAINIAN HORIZONS OF THE NORTH BLACK SEA AREA: HISTORICAL AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS

The important role in the history of Ukrainian lands belong to the North Pontic Area. Last decades the revision of old position from one side and the growing of the attention towards the problems of this region take place. The beginning of own ethnical development of Slavs tribes, known by «Ants» name or «Okrainni» by Indo-Iranian language. On the next stage of history, the tribes of Russ chronicle: Ulichi and Tyvertsy settled on Black Sea region. Colonization of this area by the Slavs lasted through more than 500 years, which created the fundamental ethnical base of autochthone population. With formation of Kyiv Russ the North Black Sea area take the important place in political, economic, ethno cultural and trade fields of the new country. The numerous settlements fixed on the Lower Dnieper and other rivers in spite of numerous nomadic tribes: every society occupy the own part of the landscape in connection from their economic type. In the of Post Kyiv Russ and Lithuanian-Russ federation, the South Russ principalities preserved their traditions and continue the progressive development. At the end of the XIV — at the beginning of XV centuries the new fortification line built under the chief of the Great Prince Vitovt in the North Black Sea Area, which opened the new stage of fortification: stone fortresses. The brilliant example of this kind is the first stone fortress Tyagin of the South part of the Lithuanian-Russ principality, as a part of the early Ukraine. In the time of Crimean-Ottoman administration in region, the Christiania autochthone population with Ukrainian part also, continue to live in the North Black sea area and became the region of Cossack colonization. The artefacts of Ukrainian culture founded in the course of the archaeological excavation (Akkerman, Ochakiv) even in the Ottoman fortresses. The anthropological investigations support the existence of great part of the settled population, which take the considerable morphological contacts with Ukrainians of the South, Central and West regions of the XVII—XIX centuries. The important factor of the living of Christian population, including Ukrainians, was the existence and activity of the Brailiv metropolis of the Konstantinopol patriarchate in the middle of the XVI—XIX cent., which escape the large area from Braila to Tyagin. The archaeological investigation of the South Ukraine increase the possibility of the knowledge of the Ukrainian history from the new modern position.

Индоир. gandharvá- и его (не)индоевропейские родственники: сравнительно-мифологические заметки

This article focuses on the etymology of Indo-Iranian gandharvá- and possible related words outside Indo-Iranian languages. Even though the old comparison of Skt. gandharvá- and Gr. κένταυρος is phonologically untenable and cannot bring us to any reconstructable Proto-Indo-European form, their phonetic similarity should not be neglected or considered accidental and is furthermore corroborated by evidence from comparative mythology. It seems very likely that both words were borrowed from some Near Eastern non-Indo-European language, possibly Kassite or a related language, being perhaps eventually traceable to a Proto-West-Caucasian etymon.

Manipulating Interword and Interletter Spacing in Cursive Script: An Eye Movements Investigation of Reading Persian.

Persian is an Indo-Iranian language that features a derivation of Arabic cursive script, where most letters within words are connectable to adjacent letters with ligatures. Two experiments are reported where the properties of Persian script were utilized to investigate the effects of reducing interword spacing and increasing the interletter distance (ligature) within a word. Experiment 1 revealed that decreasing interword spacing while extending interletter ligature by the same amount was detrimental to reading speed. Experiment 2 largely replicated these findings. The experiments show that providing the readers with inaccurate word boundary information is detrimental to reading rate. This was achieved by reducing the interword space that follows letters that do not connect to the next letter in Experiment 1, and replacing the interword space with ligature that connected the words in Experiment 2. In both experiments, readers were able to comprehend the text read, despite the considerable costs to reading rates in the experimental conditions.