the majority of Persian borrowings in several Indo-Aryan languages, such as Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali and others, as it was the administrative, official, cultural language of the Persianate Mughal Empire and served as the lingua franca throughout the Indian subcontinent for centuries. Often based in Afghanistan, Turkic Central Asian conquerors brought the language into South Asia. The basis in general for the introduction of Persian language into the subcontinent was set, from its earliest days, by various Persianized Central Asian Turkic and Afghan dynasties. The sizable Persian component of the Anglo-Indian loan words in English and in Urdu therefore reflects the Dari pronunciation. For instance, the words dopiaza and pyjama come from the Dari pronunciation; in Iranian Persian they are pronounced do-piyāzeh and pey-jāmeh. Persian lexemes and certain morphological elements (e.g., the ezāfe) have often been employed to coin words for political and cultural concepts, items, or ideas that were historically unknown outside the South Asian region, as is the case with the aforementioned "borrowings". The Dari language has a rich and colorful tradition of proverbs that deeply reflect Afghan culture and relationships, as demonstrated by U.S. Navy Captain Edward Zellem in his bilingual books on Afghan Dari proverbs collected in Afghanistan. Differences between Iranian and Afghan Persian There are phonological, lexical, and morphological differences between Afghan Persian and Iranian Persian. There are no significant differences in the written forms, other than regional idiomatic phrases. Phonological differences The phonology of Dari as spoken in Kabul, compared to Classical Persian, is overall more conservative than the standard accent of Iran. The principal differences between standard Iranian Persian and Afghan Persian as based on the Kabul dialect are: The merging of majhul vowels and into and respectively in Iranian Persian, whereas in Afghan Persian, they are still kept separate. For instance, the identically written words شیر 'lion' and 'milk' are pronounced the same in Iranian Persian as , but for 'lion' and for 'milk' in Afghan Persian. The long vowel in زود "quick" and زور "strength" is realized as in Iranian Persian, in contrast, these words are pronounced and respectively by Persian speakers in Afghanistan. The Classical Persian high short vowels and tend to be lowered in Iranian Persian to and , unlike in Dari where they might have both high and lowered allophones. The treatment of the diphthongs of early Classical Persian "ay" (as "i" in English "size") and "aw" (as