perso

An ethnonym, and Esperanto builds those on one pattern. The person is perso, the adjective is persa, the woman is persino, and the country is Persujo or Persio by the two competing suffixes the language argues about. That is the same machinery as anglo and Anglujo, franco and Francujo, ĉino and Ĉinujo. The countries and peoples article sets out which nations take the people-first pattern and which take the land-first one, because Esperanto genuinely has both and the split is historical rather than logical.

The naming, stated plainly. Persia and Iran are the same country. The Persians called it Iran; outsiders called it Persia after Parsa, one province of it, which is what the Greeks ran into first. In 1935 the government asked the world to use the domestic name, so Irano is the modern country and Persujo or Persio is the historical one. Perso remains the word for the people and persa for the language and the culture, exactly as English keeps Persian carpets and Persian poetry while writing Iran on the map. Not every Iranian is a perso: Azeris, Kurds and Baloch are citizens of Irano without being Persians, and the distinction matters to the people it applies to.

One Persian noun paid for a whole shelf of your vocabulary.Ŝako at rank 1,721 is chess, and the root is Persian shah, the king: ŝak is the warning that the king is attacked, and ŝakmato is shah mat, the king is helpless. Two more arrived by the same road. A bazaro is Persian bazar. And Latin took persicum malum, the Persian apple, for the fruit that reached Rome from that direction, which is why English says peach and Esperanto says persiko - a Persian hiding inside a piece of fruit.