Echoes Across Centuries: Phonetic Signatures of Persian Poets

TL;DR

This study analyzes phonetic features in a large corpus of Persian poetry to uncover poet-specific styles and historical shifts, revealing that phonetic variation is conditioned by poetic context rather than individual idiosyncrasy.

Contribution

It introduces a computational framework for phonetic analysis in Persian poetry, demonstrating systematic poet-level differences and historical phonetic shifts within shared metrical structures.

Findings

Poet-level phonetic differences persist after controlling for meter and form.

Distinct phonetic profiles correlate with different poetic styles and genres.

Phonetic distributions evolve across centuries, reflecting broader cultural changes.

Abstract

This study examines phonetic texture in Persian poetry as a literary-historical phenomenon rather than a by-product of meter or a feature used only for classification. The analysis draws on a large corpus of 1,116,306 mesras from 31,988 poems written by 83 poets, restricted to five major classical meters to enable controlled comparison. Each line is converted into a grapheme-to-phoneme representation and analyzed using six phonetic metrics: hardness, sonority, sibilance, vowel ratio, phoneme entropy, and consonant-cluster ratio. Statistical models estimate poet-level differences while controlling for meter, poetic form, and line length. The results show that although meter and form explain a substantial portion of phonetic variation, they do not eliminate systematic differences between poets. Persian poetic sound therefore appears as conditioned variation within shared prosodic structures rather than as either purely individual style or simple metrical residue. A multidimensional stylistic map reveals several recurrent phonetic profiles, including high-sonority lyric styles, hardness-driven rhetorical or epic styles, sibilant mystical contours, and high-entropy complex textures. Historical analysis indicates that phonetic distributions shift across centuries, reflecting changes in genre prominence, literary institutions, and performance contexts rather than abrupt stylistic breaks. The study establishes a corpus-scale framework for phonetic analysis in Persian poetry and demonstrates how computational phonetics can contribute to literary-historical interpretation while remaining attentive to the formal structures that shape Persian verse.