What is Tashdid (Tashdeed, gemination) in Persian?

Tašdid, تشدید literally, ‘gemination,’ is sometimes called “doubling.” Look at this English word ‘attach’. As you see, we have two ‘T’ in this word. Just suppose that we are breaking this word like this: ‘at- tach’. What we find out here is that our tongue stops or pauses on the first ‘T’ and pronounces the second ‘T’.

What the Persian grammar, or I’d better say the Arab-based grammar, is asking us to do is this:

” Whenever one letter is written twice and the first one is paused, we should simply delete the first one and pronounce the second one with an emphasis.”

 

Examples of Tashdid in Persian

This word is pronounced as below in Persian:

I need to mention it here that this one is not used very often in Persian but it is used anyway! The representative of this emphasis or Tashdid is what you see here on ‘A’: .

For example .

You can see more examples of Tashdid in the table below:

pronunciation	talaffoz	تلفّظ
child	bacce	بچّه
valley	darre	درّه
The prophet of Islam's name	Mohammad	محمّد
painter	Naqqāš	نقّاش
circular	modavvar	مدوّر

 

Tashdid (gemination) for pronouncing numbers

Don't foorget that the و in Persian numbers دوم dovom and سوم sevom must not be geminated. Therefore, the common pronunciation of these words as دوّم dovvom and سوّم sevvom is only on analogy with the geminated و in the Arabic اوّل awwal ‘first’ and اوّلاً awwalan ‘firstly’ (Persian avval, avvalan) (that is to say, dovom and sevom, without a geminated [v] are the correct pronunciations).

You can find more information about Persian alphabet from this link. If you have any questions, just leave us a comment below.