Persian was long misclassified as Semitic for want of proof otherwise
Evidence
The Reverend Edmund Castell (1606–86), the second holder of the Thomas Adams Professorship, from 1667 until 1685, was in some respects a more considerable figure. Like so many of his colleagues, Castell was not in the slightest interested in Islam. Rather, his chief enthusiasm was for trying to establish links with the Eastern Christian Churches. However, he also hoped that Arabic might be useful in identifying obscure plants mentioned in the Bible. He had worked on the London Polyglot Bible and his own work on the Lexicon Heptaglotton (1669), a comparative dictionary of seven languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Samaritan, Ethiopian, Arabic and Persian), evolved out of that project. Essentially it was a dictionary of Semitic languages and Persian was included only because it had not yet been demonstrated that Persian was not a Semitic language. (In fact, Persian is an Indo-Aryan language.) — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 172
Categorization
- CANDY: A fun elevator fact: Persian got listed in a ‘Semitic’ dictionary only because no one had yet proven it wasn’t Semitic.