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Wikipedia / Ezāfe

The ezāfe ( or ; , ) is a grammatical particle found in Persian, in some other Iranian languages (particularly the western ones), as well as Persian-influenced languages such as Azerbaijani, Ottoman Turkish, Chagatai, Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu), Punjabi, Sindhi, Bengali and Kashmiri; that links two words together. In the Persian language, it consists of the unstressed short vowel -e or -i (-ye or -yi after vowels) between the words it connects and often approximately corresponds in usage to the English preposition of. It is generally not indicated in writing in the Persian alphabet, which is normally written without short vowels, but it is indicated in Tajik Persian, which is written in a modified Cyrillic script, as without a hyphen.

In Persian (and Tajik)

Common uses of the Persian ezāfe are:

  • Possessive (like pertensive marking): "Mary's brother" (it can also apply to pronominal possession, "my brother", but in speech it is much more common to use possessive suffixes: ).

  • Adjective-noun: "the big brother".

  • Given name/title-family name: , "Mr. Mosaddeq"

  • Linking two nouns: "Tehran Street" or "Road to Tehran"

After final long vowels ( or ) in words, the ezāfe is written with the letter () intervening before the ezāfe ending. If a word ends in the short vowel (designated by a ), the ezāfe may be marked either by placing a hamza diacritic over the () or a non-connecting after it (). The is prevented from joining by placing a zero-width non-joiner, known in Persian as (), after the .

In Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi and Saraiki

Iẓāfat, or iẓāfā; in Hindi, Punjabi and Saraiki (and even more so in Persianized Urdu and languages written in Shahmukhi), is a syntactical construction of two nouns, where the first component is a determined noun, and the second is a determiner. This grammatical construction was entirely borrowed from Persian. In Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu), Punjabi and Saraiki; a short vowel "i" is used to connect these two words, and when pronouncing the newly formed word the short vowel is connected to the first word. If the first word ends in a consonant or an (), it may be written as () at the end of the first word, but usually is not written at all. If the first word ends in () or ( or ) then hamza () is used above the last letter ( or or ). If the first word ends in a long vowel ( or ), then a different variation of () with hamza on top (, obtained by adding to ) is added at the end of the first word. In Devanagari and Gurmukhi, these characters are written as and respectively.

In other languages

Besides Persian, ezāfe is found in other Iranian languages and in Persian-influenced Turkic languages, which have historically borrowed many words, phrases and expressions from Persian. Ottoman Turkish made extensive use of ezāfe, borrowing it from Persian (the official name of the Ottoman Empire was ), but it is transcribed as -i or -ı (rather than -e). ezāfe is also used frequently in Hindustani, but its use is mostly restricted to Urdu poetic settings or to phrases imported wholesale from Persian since Hindustani by default expresses the genitive with the native declined possessive postposition kā. The title of the Bollywood film, Salaam-e-Ishq, is an example of the use of the ezāfe in Hindustani. Other examples of ezāfe in Hindustani include terms like "death penalty" and "praiseworthy". It can also be found in the neo-Bengali language (Bangladeshi, but also especially Dobhashi) constructions especially for titles such as (Tiger of Bengal), (Islamic assembly) and (Month of Ramadan).

The Albanian language also has an ezāfe-like construction, for example in , Party of Labour of Albania (the Albanian communist party). The linking particle declines in accordance with the gender, definiteness, and number of the noun that precedes it. It is used in adjectival declension and in forming the genitive:

  • "The Boss' office" (The office of the boss)

  • "In an adjacent office"

  • "Outside his office" (The office of his)

Besides the above mentioned languages, ezāfe is also used in the Northwestern Iranian Kurdish language:

Etymology

Originally, in Old Persian, nouns had case endings, just like every other early Indo-European language (such as Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Proto-Slavic, and Proto-Germanic). A genitive construction would have looked much like a Latin construct, with the first noun being in any case, and the second being in the genitive case.

However, over time, a relative pronoun such as or (meaning "which") began to be interposed between the first element and its genitive attribute.

  • by the will which (is) of Auramazdah

William St. Clair Tisdall states that the modern Persian ezāfe stems from the relative pronoun which, which in Eastern Iranian languages (Avestan) was or . Pahlavi (Middle Persian) shortened it to (spelled with the letter Y in Pahlavi scripts), and after noun case endings passed out of usage, this relative pronoun which (pronounced in New Persian), became a genitive "construct" marker. Thus the phrase

historically means "man which (is) good" rather than "good man."

In other modern Western Iranian languages, such as Kurmanji (Northern Kurdish), the ezāfe particle is still a relative pronoun, which declines for gender and number. However, rather than translating it as "which," as its etymological origin suggests, a more accurate translation for the Persian use of ezāfe would be a linking genitive/attributive "of" or, in the case of adjectives, not translating it.

Since the ezāfe is not typical of the Avestan (a Central Iranian language) and most Eastern Iranian languages, where the possessives and adjectives normally precede their head noun without a linker, an argument has been put forward that the ezāfe construction may represent a substrate feature of the ancient Elamite (a language isolate) influence on Old Persian, which followed the Iranian migration to the territories of the Iranian plateau previously inhabited by the ancient pre-Iranic Elamites who spoke Elamite.

See also

Notes

References

Bibliography