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Grammar - Morphology and Syntax: Persian is an SOV language, meaning that the general structure of sentences is Subject-Object-Verb. English, in contrast, is SVO. The Persian language relies on an affixal system that makes use of both prefixes and suffixes. However, much of the complex nominal and verbal inflection of Old Persian has been lost in New Persian, including the inflectional distinction of case, number, and gender in addition to tense, mood, aspect, and verbal gender. It can be said, therefore, that Persian has no grammatical gender, and no formal case system. However, person and number continue to be distinguished in New Persian, as do human and non-human gender. Persian Pronouns
(Windfuhr, World's Major Languages, 1987, p. 530) All independent pronouns refer to humans only. Therefore u is the equivalent of he/she in English, though no gender distinction is made. Nonhuman items are referred to with the demonstratives in/an, the equivalent of this and that in English. The English pronoun it has no equivalent in Persian. Persian nouns may be simple or compound. Compound nouns may be made up of two nouns or a noun and a verb. For example, saheb means 'owner', and xane means 'house', saheb-xane means 'landlord'. Similarly, hava means 'air', -peyma means 'to transverse', and bar means to carry. Together, [hava-peyma]-bar means '[aircraft] carrier' (Windfuhr, World's Major Languages, 1987, p. 531). An unmarked noun in Persian refers to a class of objects rather than a single thing. In order to make a noun specific, the suffix -i is added as an indefinite marker. For example, the phrase man ketab xoš daram means 'I like books', while ketab.i refers to 'a book' (Campbell, 2000, p. 1342). There is no equivalent of the English definite marker 'the'. There are two markers of specific plurality in Persian. Either the Persian plural markers -an and -ha or the Arabic "broken plural" may be used. However, the Arabic broken plural may only be applied to Arabic loan words, and is not productive in Persian, i.e. it cannot be added to newly formed Persian words. In classical usage, the Persian plural marker -an is used for humans and -ha for inanimate object and animals. In current usage, -ha is used indiscriminately. In Persian, modifiers follow the nouns they modify most of the time (though demonstrative adjectives and numerals precede nouns). Head nouns are connected to the modifiers that follow them by what is called ezafe, represented by -(y)e. The structure of a noun phrase containing an adjective in Persian, therefore, is in-Measure, Number, Kind-Noun-ha-e-Adjective-i (Windfuhr, World's Major Languages, 1987, p. 531). The suffix -ra is used to mark direct objects in Persian. Indirect objects and adverbial phrases are marked by prepositions. The Persian interrogative pronouns are ki, and ce, which function like 'who' and 'what'. There are two ways of indicating possession in Persian. The clitic -e or the enclitic pronoun -am may be used to mark possessed nouns. For example, ketab is 'book'; ketab.e man and ketab.am both mean 'my book' (Campbell, 2000, p. 1342). The suffix -i is a derivational suffix that derives nouns from adjectives and adjectives from nouns. The particle ke is used to introduce relative clauses. It functions like both 'who' and 'which' in English. The clitic -i is added to a noun modified by a restrictive relative clause. The head noun may be represented pronominally within the relative clause. For example:
"The man from whom I got it" (Facts about the World's Languages 550) Verbs The main distinctions among Persian verbs are past and present stems, and perfective and imperfective aspects. While all forms may be used in a future context, future is not marked. Persian Verb Forms
Table uses the verb rav/raft 'go', 3rd person singular, with the optional negative prefix in brackets. (Windfur, International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, 1992, p. 187) The imperfective aspect describes actions that are habitual or progressive/ingressive while the perfective expresses resultative/stative expressions. The aorist can occur in the present, particularly with motion verbs, but it is most often used in past narration. The subjunctive mood is used to describe potential action. Non-inferential past implies a fact, while inferential past is used to describe second-hand knowledge, conclusion, and reminiscence. All facts directly observed by a speaker are described using present tense. The infinitive ending for verbs is -tan/-dan/-idan. In order to form the short infinitive, which is also the past stem, -an is dropped. The present stem is formed by dropping the infinitive ending (though there are many exceptions to this rule). For example, the past stem of xaridan, 'to buy' is xarid, while the present stem is xar- (Campbell, 2000, p. 1344). Negation of sentences is brought about by adding the prefix na- to the main verb (see table above). Most Persian verbs are compounds made from combining a nominal, often an Arabic loan word, with a function verb. For example, the verb montazer budan/šodan, meaning 'to wait,' literally means 'to be/become waiting.' The verbs kardan, and šodan ('to do' or 'make' and 'to become' respectively) are particularly productive function verbs in this respect.
The Persian language contains many loan words. Approximately 50% of the Persian lexicon is comprised of Arabic loan words, though only 25% of the words in general use are of Arabic origin. Persian also contains words borrowed from European languages, particularly French and English. Because of its tendency to borrow words from other languages, Persian has a lot of synonyms derived from different language roots. For example, words for 'lecture' or 'speech' include the Persian word soxanrani, the words xetab and xetabe from Arabic, and the word konferans from French (Perry, 2001, p. 550). |
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