[Persian in the Soviet Latin alphabet] Mas'ud, H. Grammar of the Persian Language for Primary Schools, Part One (Gramere zəbane farsi bəraje məkatebe ebtedai. Qesməte əvvəl). Ashgabat, 1933. In Persian (Latin script).

Mas'ud, H. Grammar of the Persian Language for Primary Schools, Part One, Years One and Two. Edited by J. Khalilov.
Ashgabat: Turkmen State Publishing House, 1933. 60 pp.; standard format.
Hardcover. Print run 2,000 copies. In Persian, Latin script.
Line illustrations in the text. Owner's inscription in violet ink on the title page.
Binding fair: rubbed edges, loss of surface paper and stains on the front board, stains on the back board, loss of cloth at the lower end of the spine. Text block good: complete, toned, staining along the inner margin.

A primary-school textbook of the Persian language, printed in Ashgabat in 1933 in the Latin-based Persian alphabet that was used in the Soviet Union from about 1931 to 1938, and approved for schools by the collegium of the People's Commissariat of Education of the Turkmen SSR. The author appears on the cover as H. Mas'ud (Masudi in the Russian form); the volume was edited by J. Khalilov. It is the first part of a course for the first and second years of study, in two sections: the first year covers the sentence, the word, capital letters, syllables, sounds and the letters K, G and J; the second year covers question, statement and exclamatory sentences, voiced and voiceless sounds, double consonants, singular and plural, prepositions and the ezafe construction. The exercises are accompanied by line illustrations and cursive writing models in the same Latin alphabet; on page 17 appear portraits of Lenin and Stalin under the caption "Our leaders". The book belongs to the short-lived Soviet experiment of teaching Persian-speaking children of Turkmenistan in their native language and in a Romanized script, a policy that was reversed within a few years, which makes such textbooks unusually fragile witnesses. The print run was 2,000 copies, printed on poor wartime-era pulp-type paper typical of early 1930s Central Asian presses. It is of interest to Iranists, historians of Soviet language policy and Latinization, collectors of Central Asian and Turkmen imprints, and specialists in the history of education.