The Oxford Handbook of Persian Linguistics.

Word order typology and verb agreement are this author's primary touchstones: he argues (pp. 80-83, citing earlier support from Greenberg and Darmesteter) that modern Persian is basically analytic, having steadily supplemented the small inventory of simplex verbs since Middle Persian times by combining light verbs with nominals to create new compound tenses by grammaticalization (see Chapter 10). Textbooks by Europeans are extant from the 1600s, and the British involvement in India at the height of its production of Persian dictionaries led to the first modern Persian grammar by Sir Willliam Jones in 1771. In 1785 he toured the region, meeting local poets, and reported to his superiors that the Persian patois taught to their sepoys and the Classical Persian used by their clerks were inadequate: the local vernacular was now a Persian-Hindi hybrid called "Hindustani" (later Urdu) with a literary register. Iranian scholars played a leading role in early Arabic grammar and lexicography; they promulgated both the pre-Islamic Persian vocabulary preserved by Ferdowsi and (in bilingual dictionaries), the new Arabic lexis flooding into Persian. [Extracted from the article]