Echoes Across Centuries: Phonetic Signatures of Persian Poets

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.

Figures (15)

• Figure 1: Structure of the analytical corpus. The header reports the scale of the balanced cohort directly: 1,116,306 mesras, 31,988 poems, and 83 poets across the five retained classical meters. In mesra terms these meters account for 77.6% of rows with usable meter/form metadata and 100% of the final inferential cohort. Panel A shows poem counts and shares across mutaqarib, hazaj, ramal, mujtass, and muzari', identifying the prosodic field within which controlled comparison is possible. Panel B plots poems per century for the metadata-linked subset, showing the historical span on which the century analysis rests.
• Figure 2: Distributions of the three primary phonetic outcomes in the controlled analytical population. Hardness and sonority cluster around stable central tendencies, whereas sibilance has a longer upper tail, indicating that strongly strident texture is a specialized rather than ordinary condition.
• Figure 3: Incremental variance explained by successive control layers in the hardness models. Meter and form account for substantial structure, but poet identity still contributes additional signal once those layers are controlled.
• Figure 4: Selected controlled hardness contrasts with confidence intervals. The coefficients remain moderate in magnitude, indicating that Persian poetic style is neither metrically exhausted nor acoustically discontinuous across poets.
• Figure 5: Century trajectories for hardness, sonority, sibilance, and entropy with poem-bootstrap uncertainty bands. The curves show redistribution across the attested centuries of the corpus rather than a single linear shift from "hard" to "soft."