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This paper investigates semantic change in Persian poetry by analyzing the evolution of word neighborhoods in aligned Word2Vec spaces across centuries and poets. It models semantic change as the rewiring of local semantic graphs, focusing on the gain/loss of neighbors, shifts in bridge roles, and movement across communities for 20 target words. The study reveals distinct patterns of change, with some words being more time-sensitive, others more poet-sensitive, and some exhibiting continuity despite graph-role mobility, suggesting that semantic change is better captured as neighborhood rewiring than abstract drift.
Semantic change isn't just abstract drift; it's a rewiring of word relationships, and analyzing these shifting connections in Persian poetry reveals surprising sensitivities to time, poet, and even the choice of reference terms.
Meaning in Persian poetry is both historical and relational. Words persist through literary tradition while shifting their force through changing constellations of neighbors, rhetorical frames, and poetic voices. This study examines that process using aligned Word2Vec spaces combined with graph-based neighborhood analysis across centuries and major poets. Rather than modeling semantic change as vector displacement alone, it treats lexical history as the rewiring of local semantic graphs: the gain and loss of neighbors, shifts in bridge roles, and movement across communities. The analysis centers on twenty target words, anchored by five recurrent reference terms: Earth, Night, two wine terms, and Heart. Surrounding them are affective, courtly, elemental, and Sufi concepts such as Love, Sorrow, Dervish, King, Annihilation, and Truth. These words exhibit distinct patterns of change. Night is more time-sensitive, Earth more poet-sensitive, and Heart shows continuity despite graph-role mobility. The two wine terms highlight probe sensitivity: one is broad and semantically diffuse, while the other is narrower and more stable. A lexical audit confirms that the corpus contains historically driven terms, poet-specific usages, and sparsely attested mystical vocabulary requiring caution. Overall, semantic change in Persian poetry is better captured as neighborhood rewiring than as abstract drift. For Digital Humanities, this approach restores local structure to computational analysis and supports interpretations closer to literary practice: persistence, migration, mediation, and selective transformation.