What it means
سیاسی (siasi) is the Persian adjective political. It is built from سیاست (siasat, politics, the conduct of public affairs), with the -i suffix that turns nouns into adjectives. The word covers political in the institutional sense (political party, political prisoner, political system) and in the looser sense of strategically calculated (a political answer to a question).
The siasi / ejtemai pair
Persian journalism couples siasi with ejtemai (social) constantly. اخبار سیاسی (akhbar-e siasi, political news) sits next to اخبار اجتماعی (akhbar-e ejtemai, social news) in every newspaper section list. The two adjectives form a paradigm of regular derivation from Arabic-origin nouns via the Persian -i suffix:
- سیاست (siasat, politics) gives سیاسی (siasi, political)
- اجتماع (ejtema, society) gives اجتماعی (ejtemai, social)
The two words travel together, and learners who absorb one absorb the pattern for the other.
How to use it
in tasmim siasi-st, na eqtesadi.
This is a political decision, not an economic one.
این تصمیم سیاسی است، نه اقتصادی.
zendaniyan-e siasi dar iran zir-e fesharand.
Political prisoners in Iran are under pressure.
زندانیان سیاسی در ایران زیر فشارند.
pasokh-e u khali siasi bud, hich chiz nagoft.
His answer was purely political, he said nothing.
پاسخ او خالی سیاسی بود، هیچ چیز نگفت.
Where it comes from
The noun سیاست is Arabic, from the root s-w-s (سوس, to govern, to manage, originally to tend horses), with the medieval semantic shift from animal husbandry to governance running through both Arabic and Persian. Persian borrowed siasat during the spread of Arabic political vocabulary in the Islamic period and built siasi by adding the Persian relational -i suffix. The result is the standard shape of Persian intellectual adjectives: Arabic stem, Persian termination.
References
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